Category: Ecology
-
Humans affecting the forest. Forest affecting humans.
Human biomass utilization reduces global carbon stocks in vegetation by 50%, implying that massive emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere have occurred over the past centuries and millennia. The contribution of forest management and livestock grazing on natural grasslands to global carbon losses is of similar magnitude as that of deforestation. Currently, these effects are…
-
Copying nature. For what?
Sunlight reflected by solar cells is lost as unused energy. The wings of the butterfly Pachliopta aristolochiae are drilled by nanostructures (nanoholes) that help absorbing light over a wide spectrum far better than smooth surfaces. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now succeeded in transferring these nanostructures to solar cells and, thus, enhancing…
-
Rivers. Complex deltas. Order out of chaos.
River deltas, with their intricate networks of waterways, coastal barrier islands, wetlands and estuaries, often appear to have been formed by random processes, but scientists at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions see order in the apparent chaos. Through field studies and mathematical modeling, they have concluded that deltas "self-organize" to increase the…
-
Bear. Silence. Destruction.
Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic National Park is so vast that it stretches across an area bigger than Vermont, Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Karupa Lake, tucked off in its northern corner, is so remote that reaching it takes a four-hour skiplane flight from Fairbanks. And it’s so quiet — a day alone there could…
-
Pollution… Prejudice… Can of beer…
Places where someone might think there is no pollution at all, seem to be polluted as some of the worst (known) polluted areas in the world. "Extraordinary" levels of pollution have been found 10 km deep in the Mariana Trench. (1) The world is One. And no matter how much we like to think otherwise……
You must be logged in to post a comment.