| The Climate's Warm Future Is Now in the Arctic When the summer sea ice goes, the Arctic will lose the ivory gull, Pacific walrus, ringed seal, hooded seal, narwhal and polar bear--all animals that rely on the ice for foraging, reproduction or as refuge from predators. And the sea ice is going, faster and faster: In the past 30 years, minimum sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean has declined by 45,000 square kilometers annually*--an area twice the size of New Jersey is lost each year. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Tree Ring Science and Tomorrow's Water Tree ring expert Kevin Anchukaitis, of the tree ring lab at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, talks about the information available in tree rings. And Colin Chartres, the director general of the International Water Management Institute, talks to Lynn Peeples about water issues. Plus, we test your knowledge of some recent science in the news, specifically the November issue of Scientific American magazine. Web sites related to this episode include http://snipurl.com/sciamwater ; http://snipurl.com/sciamnov The transcript of this podcast wil be posted in two to three weeks. [More] rss.sciam.com |
American Pika Denied Endangered Species Status The Fish and Wildlife Service has rejected a bid to extend endangered species protection to a rabbit-like creature that environmentalists say could be pushed to extinction by rising temperatures.The warming of the American pika's mountain habitat in California's Sierra Nevada and in parts of nine other Western states has shrunk the tiny mammal's population and could eliminate part of its range, but federal biologists say new studies suggest the pika will adjust to warmer homes or migrate to cooler areas upslope. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Tornado Surrounded by Instruments as Scientists Aim to Catch Their "Perfect Storm" On May 1, more than 100 scientists will head out to the Midwest for the second part of VORTEX2 , the most ambitious study of tornadoes in history. They plan to hunt down and literally surround twisters with a fleet of mobile radars, weather balloons, and ground instruments. This is VORTEX2’s second and final season and the hope is to better understand how and when a tornado will form. [More] Tornado - Meteorology - Earth Sciences - Atmospheric Sciences - Weather Phenomena rss.sciam.com |
Favorite Colors: Color Preference Determined by Desirability of Objects Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that people would approach or withdraw from objects based on their colors. Bright reds and yellows often mean ripe, delicious fruit, whereas drab yellowish-greens and browns signal ... well, less pleasant things.To test whether the objects most commonly associated with particular colors really do determine color preference, psychologists Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss of the University of California, Berkeley, asked a group of volunteers to brainstorm all the common objects they associated with each of 32 colors. When presented with yellow, for example, they listed things such as bananas, canary birds and mustard, among other items. A second, separate group then rated the appeal of every object on a scale of negative 100 (icky) to 100 (lovely), and a third group rated how well each color matched each object (for instance, bananas are in­deed highly associated with the color yellow, but mustard is less so, perhaps because some people think of it as closer to brown). [More] Color - Berkeley - Social Sciences - Psychology - Online Tools rss.sciam.com |