Washington, Oct 10 : Scientists have found that the common or garden earthworms are far more diverse than previously thought, a discovery with important consequences for agriculture.
The research team, from Cardiff University in the UK, found that many of the common earthworm species found in gardens and on agricultural land are actually made up of a number of distinct species that may have different roles in food chains and soil structure and ecology.
This discovery was made when efforts to develop better tools to identify earthworm DNA in the guts of slug and worm-eating beetles produced some very unexpected results.
Washington, Oct 10 : A new study has shown that wildfires can boost ozone pollution to levels that violate health standards.
The research, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), focused on California wildfires in 2007, finding that they repeatedly caused ground-level ozone to spike to unhealthy levels across a broad area, including much of rural California as well as neighboring Nevada.
"It''s important to understand the health impacts of wildfires," said NCAR scientist Gabriele Pfister, the lead author. "Ozone can hit unhealthy levels even in places where people don''t see smoke," he added.
Washington, October 10 : A pair of Penn State researchers has come up with a statistical approach that may one day make Internet searches for photographs quite easier.
The tool they use for this purpose is called Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time (ALIPR), which works by teaching computers to recognize the contents of photographs, such as buildings, people, or landscapes.
The procedure is very different from searching for keywords in the surrounding text, as is done with most current image-retrieval systems.
The team recently received a patent for an earlier version of the approach called ALIP, and is in the process of obtaining another patent for the more sophisticated ALIPR.
Washington, Oct 10 : Just like men, dogs too know how to win ladies’ hearts – and that too from a young age.
According to a new study, while playing, young dogs let the female pups win, even if the males have a physical advantage.
They might lose the game in the short run, but they could win at love in the future.
The experts found that male dogs place themselves in potentially disadvantageous positions, which could make them more vulnerable to attack, and researchers suspect the opportunity to play may be more important to them than winning.
Infact, the gentlemanly dog behavior is even accompanied with a bow.
Washington, October 10 : The current economic crisis may stop U. S. citizens from voting, says an expert.
S. David Mitchell, a professor of law at the University of Missouri, said that she had studied the impact of laws related to felon disenfranchisement and the collateral consequences of felony convictions, not only on ex-offenders but their families also.
The researcher also reviewed how disenfranchisement could contribute to the undermining of citizenship as a legal status.
Mitchell recently explored the concept of citizenship, and the detrimental impact on individual and collective or community citizenship when individuals were disenfranchised.
