TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| A tree grows in Vietnam... and another is lost in Burma Since the 1990s, Vietnam has managed a seemingly impressive forestry trick: While overall forest cover in the country has increased, so have its exports of wood goods, like patio furniture. So how did the Southeast Asian country manage the feat? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Sicilian Curse: People Living Near Volcanic Mount Etna Could Face Increased Risk of Thyroid Cancer At nearly 11,000 feet, Mount Etna in eastern Sicily is one of the world's most active volcanoes. And while the peak erupts at a slow enough rate for people to escape a lava burial, the gentle giant could put people at an increased risk of a different hazard--the development of thyroid cancer. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Historical Development: Could a Frozen Camera Dethrone Hillary and Norgay as the First to Summit Everest? On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine left their camp less than a kilometer from the summit of Mount Everest on a mission to be the first mountaineers to ascend the world's highest peak (8,850 meters). They were never to be heard from again. Whether either man reached the summit--almost three decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic 1953 climb--has been an open question for nearly 86 years. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Swept Away: New Modeling Buoys Raft Theory for Origin of Madagascar's Mammals The African island of Madagascar, situated some 430 kilometers off the coast of Mozambique, is famous for its unique fauna, particularly its charismatic primates, the lemurs. But how the lemurs and other land mammals got there has proved an enduring mystery. To that end, new evidence supports a theory that some experts once considered unlikely: namely, that the forerunners of Madagascar’s modern mammals reached the island millions of years ago by drifting from the African mainland across the Mozambique Channel on giant rafts of vegetation ripped from the shore and launched out to sea by violent storms.Reconstructing ancient dispersal routes is a complex exercise. On Madagascar this puzzle is complicated by the fact that the fossil record of mammals from the past 65 million years is meager. Based on the paltry available clues, some researchers thought the ancestral mammalian stock arrived via a landbridge that later disappeared with the shifting of landmasses. But geologic evidence of such landbridges is weak at best. Moreover, this theory cannot account for why the island’s many endemic terrestrial mammal species represent only four of Africa’s broader mammal groups called orders. And all of Madagascar’s land mammals are relatively small--no elephants, lions or giraffes there. If landbridges existed, critics argued, why did only small mammals belonging to these four orders make the trip over? [More] rss.sciam.com |
Death and Chocolate In a rare tale of technology, bio­terrorism and chocolate, scientists are racing to sequence the cacao tree genome. They fear that without the genome in hand they will be unable to stop the spread of two virulent pathogens that threaten to devastate the world’s cocoa crop.Cacao trees were first domesticated more then 1,500 years ago by Mayans living in what is now Central America, but fungal diseases such as witch’s broom and frosty pod have largely chased the bean out of its native habitat. The great worry is that one of these diseases will cross the Atlantic Ocean to West Africa, where 70 percent of the crop is now produced. Cacao trees in West Africa have no resistance to the pathogens, which form spores and spread via the wind, careless farmers and, in at least one case, bioterrorists. Scientists say that just a few infected pods would lead to the loss of one third of total global production. [More] Chocolate - Central America - Atlantic Ocean - West Africa - Africa rss.sciam.com |