articles

Researchers from the University of Sheffield have discovered that looking at honeybees in a colony in the same way as neurons in a brain could help us better understand the basic mechanisms of human behaviour.

Incentive programs to encourage farmers and other landowners to protect the environment are key to conservation, but new research shows issues such as lack of enforcement undermine their effectiveness on a global scale.

These programs, called Payments for Environmental Services (PES), are a way to improve environmental management and livelihoods by attaching a dollar value to the benefits nature provides, such as clean water and air. They have been in place for two decades, but their design and cost-effectiveness are a concern for experts.

Police detectives analyze isotopes in human hair to find out where a murder victim was born and grew up. Researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, the University of Florida and the University of Arizona combined clues from carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and strontium isotope analysis discovering the earliest evidence that the Maya raised and traded dogs and other animals, probably for ceremonial use.

Controlling greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades could substantially reduce the consequences of carbon releases from thawing permafrost during the next 300 years, according to a new paper published this week in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Half of Alberta’s upland boreal forest is likely to disappear over the next century due to climate change, a new study shows.