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32 New Planets Found Outside Our Solar System

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By James Owen - Oct. 20 (News Report) - Astronomers have added 32 new planets to the list of planets found orbiting stars outside our solar system. The discoveries, announced today at a press briefing in Portugal, increase to more than 400 the number of known extrasolar planets

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Googling Fights Dementia, Study Suggests

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Ker Than - Oct. 20 (Special Report) - Using search engines may help stave off dementia and memory loss, a new brain-scan study suggests. Scientists found that middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience showed increased activity in key brain regions after surfing the Web

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"Surreal" Vegetarian Spider Found -- A First

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Matt Kaplan - Oct. 12 (News Report) - A tropical jumping spider that eats mostly plant buds has been identified, a new study says--making it the only known vegetarian out of some 40,000 spider species. A tropical jumping spider that eats mostly plant buds has been identified, a new study

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Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Christine Dell'Amore - Oct. 09 (News Report) - Beware of the blob—this time, it's for real. As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says

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Killer Whales Strain to "Talk" Over Ship Noise?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Christine Dell'Amore - Sep. 11 (News Report) - Killer whales raise their voices to be heard over boat noise, and the effort may be wearing the whales out as they try to find food amid dwindling numbers of salmon, new research says. The killer whales of Puget Sound make more calls and clicks while

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Next Ice Age Delayed by Global Warming, Study Says

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Christine Dell'Amore - Sep. 04 (News Report) - The North Pole is warmer now than it has been in the past 2,000 years, a trend that is holding off the next ice age, according to the most extensive study yet on Arctic climate change.

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CO2 Levels Highest in Two Million Years

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Maggie Koerth-Baker - Jun. 18 (News Report) - By studying chemicals in long-dead, single-celled plankton called foraminifera, though, the team behind the new study was able to extend the climate record back 2.1 million years

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Pollution Can Change Your DNA in 3 Days, Study Suggests

Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Ker Than - May. 17 (Special Report) - Breathing in polluted air may wreak havoc on our DNA, reprogramming genes in as few as three days and causing increased rates of cancer and other diseases. So says a new study that tracked DNA damage in 63 steel-foundry workers in Brescia, Italy, who, under their normal factory conditions, were exposed to particulate matter.

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Earth Day Facts: When It Is, How It Began, What to Do

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By John Roach - Apr. 21 (Special Report) - From not-so-humble beginnings in 1970, when 20 million participated across the U.S., Earth Day has grown into a global tradition, with a billion expected to take part in 2009. Find out when it is, how it started, how it's evolved, and what you can do.

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Amphibian Loss: The Vanishing

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Jennifer Holland - Mar. 19 (Special Report) - Amphibians are among the groups hardest hit by today's many strikes against wildlife. As many as half of all species are under threat. Hundreds are sliding toward extinction, and dozens are already lost. The declines are rapid and widespread, and their causes complex—even at the ravine near Limón the bulldozer is just one hazard of many. But there are glimmers of hope. Rescue efforts now under way will shelter some animals until the storm of extinction passes. And, at least in the lab, scientists have treated frogs for a fungal disease that is devastating populations around the world.

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Canadian Oil Sands

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Robert Kunzig - Mar. 03 (Special Report) - Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles. Last April some 500 migrating ducks mistook one of those ponds, at a newer Syncrude mine north of Fort McKay, for a hospitable stopover, landed on its oily surface, and died. The incident stirred international attention—Greenpeace broke into the Syncrude facility and hoisted a banner of a skull over the pipe discharging tailings, along with a sign that read "World's Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands."

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Energy Conservation

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Peter Miller, Tyrone Turner - Feb. 19 (Special Report) - We decided to try an experiment. For one month we tracked our personal emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) as if we were counting calories. We wanted to see how much we could cut back, so we put ourselves on a strict diet. The average U.S. household produces about 150 pounds of CO2 a day by doing commonplace things like turning on air-conditioning or driving cars. That's more than twice the European average and almost five times the global average, mostly because Americans drive more and have bigger houses.

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Extinction: What Can We Do?

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Virginia Morell - Jan. 22 (Opinion) - Most of us don’t think about extinctions when we think of Hawaii. But for conservation biologist Stuart Pimm that’s the first image that enters his mind. Since 1978 he’s been involved with studies of the last of these islands’ native birds—only 30 species. Scientists believe 135 bird species inhabited the isles before the first human settlers arrived by canoe 1,500 years ago. And of these 30, says Pimm, only ten have any chance of long-term survival. “You can find ten of them with a little searching,” he says. “Ten are really rare, and another ten are so rare that there are no hopes of our being able to save them. It’s like going to a restaurant to meet your friends, and suddenly finding that two-thirds of them are dead.”

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Amphibian Extinctions: Is Global Warming Off the Hook?

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Brian Handwerk - Dec. 02 (Special Report) - But J. Alan Pounds, resident scientist at Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and an author of previous research on the topic, maintains climate change is a key factor in the extinction crisis. "There is a clear link between global warming and amphibian declines," he said, citing a growing body of evidence, including a recent study in Yellowstone National Park. "The analysis by Rohr et al. is seriously flawed, as we will demonstrate in due course."

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Alien-like Squid With "Elbows" Filmed at Drilling Site

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Kelly Hearn - Nov. 29 (News Report) - mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater, a remote control submersible's camera has captured an eerie surprise: an alien-like, long-armed, and—strangest of all—"elbowed" Magnapinna squid. (See photos of Magnapinna.) Printer Friendly Email to a Friend What's This? SHARE Digg StumbleUpon Reddit RELATED PHOTOS: Colossal Squid Revealed in First In-Depth Look (April 30, 2008) PHOTO: Giant Squid Captured, Filmed for First Time (December 22, 2006) VIDEO: Giant Squid Dissected in Public (July 21, 2008) In a brief video from the dive recently obtained by National Geographic News, one of the rarely seen squid loiters above the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico on November 11, 2007. The clip—from a Shell oil company ROV (remotely operated vehicle)—arrived after a long, circuitous trip through oil-industry in-boxes and other email accounts.

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India's Highway

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Don Belt - Sep. 23 (Special Report) - Much as the U.S. interstate highway system mobilized American society and grooved the postwar economy, India hopes the Golden Quadrilateral will push the country's economic engine into overdrive--bringing the benefits of growth in its booming metropolises out to its impoverished villages, where more than half the population lives.

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Earth: The Biography - Atmosphere

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Iain Stewart - Jul. 22 (Special Report) - (VIDEO) The atmosphere is Earth's protective layer, cloaking us in a warm, oxygen-rich embrace and shielding us from the cold hostility of space. It acts as a natural greenhouse, keeping the Earth 51 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it would otherwise be. Yet the atmosphere is also full of contradictions. It's immensely powerful but at the same time highly sensitive. It's destructive, yet it shelters us. It was created in part by the planet's first organisms, and it continues to be essential for life.

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Penguin Chicks Frozen by Global Warming?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By John Roach - Jul. 22 (Special Report) - The freezing of chicks is just one example of how human activity is endangering about two thirds of all penguin species, according to a new paper based on decades of research and observations.

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Global Warming Forces Innovative Sea Turtle Protection

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:27:55 -0700

National Geographic - By Dave Sherwood - Jul. 22 (News Report) - Scientists here and elsewhere are increasingly finding they have no choice but to intervene as a warming Earth, changing ocean conditions, and coastal development threaten to outpace the sea turtles' ability to adapt.

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Don't Rebuild on China Quake Faults, Experts Warn

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Kevin Holden Platt - Jun. 17 (News Analysis) - Don't Rebuild on China Quake Faults, Experts Warn

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Yellow River

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Brook Larmer - Apr. 16 (Special Report) - The proliferation of factories, farms, and cities--all products of China's spectacular economic boomis sucking the Yellow River dry. What water remains is being poisoned. From the canal bank, Shen points to another surreal flash of color: blood-red chemical waste gushing from a drainage pipe, turning the water a garish purple. This canal, which empties into the Yellow River, once teemed with fish and turtles, he says. Now its water is too toxic to use even for irrigation; two of Shen's goats died within hours of drinking from the canal.

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Animal Minds

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Virginia Morell - Feb. 21 (Special Report) - Many of Alex's cognitive skills, such as his ability to understand the concepts of same and different, are generally ascribed only to higher mammals, particularly primates. But parrots, like great apes (and humans), live a long time in complex societies. And like primates, these birds must keep track of the dynamics of changing relationships and environments.

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Mexico's Other Border

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Cynthia Gorney - Jan. 19 (Special Report) - Every year, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans cross illegally into Mexico--400,235, to cite one oddly precise estimate from the Mexican National Institute of Migration--along the country's southern border, which angles over 750 miles of river and volcanic slope and jungle at the top of Central America. Nobody knows exactly how many of those migrants are headed to the United States, but most put that figure at 150,000 or more a year, and the pace of illegal migration north has picked up dramatically over the past decade, propelled in part by the lingering aftermath of the 1970s and '80s civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. In depictions of this modern Latin American migration into the United States, the image of a great wave is often invoked, and Mexico's southern border today feels like the place in distant water where the wave first rises and swells and gathers uncontainable propulsive force.

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High-Tech Trash

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

National Geographic - By Chris Carroll - Dec. 20 (Special Report) - People have always been proficient at making trash. Future archaeologists will note that at the tail end of the 20th century, a new, noxious kind of clutter exploded across the landscape: the digital detritus that has come to be called e-waste.

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Video: Oil Spills in the Black Sea

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 09:00:51 -0800

National Geographic - Nov. 13 (News Report) - A Russian oil tanker broke apart in the northeastern Black Sea. The accident may become the worst environmental disaster to hit the region in years.

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