Gizmorama - April 24, 2013
Good Morning,Scientists say that the water pollution problem in the Gulf of Mexico didn't actually come from oil rigs but from farm fields a thousand miles away in the U.S. Midwest. That can't be true, can it?
Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
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Visit and Enjoy: EVTV1.com****-- Agriculture blamed in ocean 'Dead Zone' --*NEW ORLEANS - A water pollution problem in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't come from oil rigs but from farm fields a thousand miles away in the U.S. Midwest, scientists say. Often overshadowed by events like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, rainstorms and resulting runoff of agricultural fertilizers are a growing factor in increasingly severe water quality problems in the gulf and the creation of so-called Dead Zones, an expert said. "The Dead Zone is a vast expanse of water, sometimes as large as the state of Massachusetts, that has so little oxygen that fish, shellfish and other marine life cannot survive," oceanographer Nancy N. Rabalais told a meeting of the
American Chemical Society in New Orleans. "The oxygen disappears as a result of fertilizer that washes off farm fields in the Midwest into the Mississippi River. "Just as fertilizer makes corn and soybeans grow, it stimulates the growth of plants in the water -- algae in the Gulf. The algae bloom and eventually die and decay, removing oxygen from the water. The result is water too oxygen-depleted to support life." The Dead Zone is getting larger and more desolate, Rabalais said, with lower concentrations of oxygen dissolved in the water, and the gulf also seems to be more sensitive to the nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers that wash down the Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya River today than it was in the past. The amounts of phosphorus fertilizer compounds in the Lower Mississippi have doubled and nitrogen compounds have tripled over the last 50 years, Rabalais warned, noting oxygen levels in the Dead Zone have declined in parallel.
*-- New bat genus found in Africa --*LEWISBURG, Pa. - A new genus of bat, with distinctive badger-like black and white markings, has been identified in South Sudan, U.S. researchers say. Bucknell University biologist DeeAnn Reeder and Adrian Garside of Britain's Fauna & Flora International, leading a team of wildlife personnel from the South Sudanese Ministry of Wildlife Conservation and Tourism, spotted a rare specimen in the Bangangi Game reserve. "My attention was immediately drawn to the bat's strikingly beautiful and distinct pattern of spots and stripes. It was clearly a very extraordinary animal, one that I had never seen before," Reeder said. "I knew the second I saw it that it was the find of a lifetime." Although a previous sighting of the distinctive bat in nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1939 had resulted in it being placed in the genus Clauconycteris, Reeder and her colleagues did not believe it fit the genus. "After careful analysis, it is clear that it doesn't belong in the genus that it's in right now," Reeder said. "Its cranial characters, its wing characters, its size, the ears -- literally everything you look at doesn't fit. It's so unique that we need to create a new genus." The researchers have dubbed the bat Niumbaha superba. A new genus, Niumbaha is taken from a word meaning "rare" or "unusual" in Zande, the language of the Azande people in the region where the bat was captured. The discovery has been published in the journal ZooKeys.
*-- Russia's Putin says country must catch up in deep space exploration --*MOSCOW - Russia must catch up with other countries in deep space exploration and put a higher priority on space research projects, President Vladimir Putin said. Russia's focus on manned space flight, which consumes around half the country's total space program budget, comes at the expense of research in other fields, Putin said Friday at a conference on the development of the space industry on Cosmonautics Day. "We are behind in a number of areas. For example, in remote earth-sensing systems, personal satellite communication systems, and detection and rescue of objects in distress," Putin was quoted as saying Friday. "Of course we should preserve everything that has been achieved in piloted programs, but there is a pressing need to bring other areas up to scratch," he said. Putin also called for an increase in Russia's orbital satellite programs, development of new carrier rockets and manufacturing of more powerful rocket engines, RIA Novosti reported.
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