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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
In the future of wildlife tracking, sea otters have their own social network.
Whereas we might carry cell phones or tablets, each sea otter has a small, solar-powered tag clipped carefully to one of its flippers. When the sea otters gather to nap at the ocean’s surface, their tags boot up, and check in with one another. Who else did the sea otter interact with today, where, and when?
In a study published today in the journal Nature, astronomers from MIT and Arizona State University report that a table-sized radio antenna in a remote region of western Australia has picked up faint signals of hydrogen gas from the primordial universe.
The ocean is changing around the world—less oxygen, warmer water, higher acidity. The ability to quantify and observe those changes has never been more important, says Maia Hoeberechts, a scientist with the University of Victoria’s world-leading Ocean Networks Canada (ONC).
Despite the cooling influence of La Nina this winter, the global temperature ranked among the five warmest on record in January. Earth’s polar regions continued to experience record-low ice conditions.
As far as anyone can tell, the cold-water crayfish Faxonius eupunctus makes its home in a 30-mile stretch of the Eleven Point River and nowhere else in the world. According to a new study, the animal is most abundant in the middle part its range, a rocky expanse in southern Missouri – with up to 35,000 cubic feet of chilly Ozark river water flowing by each second.
A University of Calgary study of seasonal air pollution will be of cold comfort to thousands of Calgarians living south of the Bow River: that crisp, wintry air they’re breathing in is the worst in the city.
