Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has, he and most scientists agree, led to ‘ecological meltdown’. Whole biological food chains have been destroyed.
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In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four years’ fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts, for just $4m a year. In 2006, access for 43 giant EU factory fishing vessels to Mauritania’s long coastline was bought for £24.3m a year. It’s estimated that these deals have put 400,000 west African fishermen out of work; some of them now take to the sea only as ferrymen for desperate would-be migrants to the Canary Islands and Europe.
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Protecting up to 40 per cent of the world’s oceans in permanent refuges would enable the recovery of fish stocks and help replenish surrounding fisheries. ‘The cost, according to a 2004 survey, would be between £7bn and £8.2bn a year, after set-up. But put that against the £17.6bn a year we currently spend on harmful subsidies that encourage overfishing.’
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The Newfoundland cod fishery, for 500 years the world’s greatest, was exhausted and closed in 1992, and there’s still no evidence of any return of the fish. Once stocks dip below a certain critical level, the scientists believe, they can never recover because the entire eco-system has changed.

Engineering positions are the most difficult jobs to fill for U.S. employers, according to Manpower Inc.’s 2008 Talent Shortage Survey released April 24. Of 2,000 U.S. firms responding, 22% said they had difficulty filling positions, ranking engineers, machinists/machine operators and skilled manual trades as the top three toughest positions to fill, respectively

In one year, the former hydraulic repairman will have a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University Calumet. And, as far as he can tell, he can write his own ticket.

“I’m finding jobs pulling at me left and right,” he said last week at a manufacturing industry job fair at the college. “The professors told us there’s such a demand, if you go to a job fair, you can walk out with a job.”

Vela, 35, happens to be in a field where demand remains strong, despite the uneven economy. Overall starting wages for mechanical engineering grads will be up 3.4 percent this year, with an average salary offer of $56,429, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. For many other college grads looking for a job at this time of year, the prospects are not as sweet.

…in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Elephants in the region encounter different ethnic groups, including the Maasai, whose young men spear elephants, and the Kamba, agricultural villagers who pose no threat at all.

The researchers observed elephants exposed to the scent from identical cloth garments, some worn by Maasai men, others by Kamba men and some that were unworn. The Maasai scent produced the strongest reactions, with elephants moving farther and faster to distance themselves from the odor source, often not stopping until reaching tall grass. The elephants also took far longer to calm down than those exposed to scents from the Kamba and unworn cloths.

how could a Neolithic people with simple canoes and no navigation gear manage to find, let alone colonize, hundreds of far-flung island specks scattered across an ocean that spans nearly a third of the globe?

Answers have been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological find on the island of Éfaté, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an ancient seafaring people, the distant ancestors of today’s Polynesians, taking their first steps into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a window into the shadowy world of those early voyagers.
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While the Lapita left a glorious legacy, they also left precious few clues about themselves. What little is known or surmised about them has been pieced together from fragments of pottery, animal bones, obsidian flakes, and such oblique sources as comparative linguistics and geochemistry. Although their voyages can be traced back to the northern islands of Papua New Guinea, their language—variants of which are still spoken across the Pacific—came from Taiwan. And their peculiar style of pottery decoration, created by pressing a carved stamp into the clay, probably had its roots in the northern Philippines.

Four decades after scientists showed that migratory birds use Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves during their seasonal journeys, researchers have at last found a molecular mechanism that may explain how they do it.

If the hypothesis is true, the planet’s magnetic field lines — which arch around Earth from north to south — may be plainly visible to birds, like the dashed line in the middle of a road.

The work, described online yesterday in the journal Nature, was conducted in a test tube and does not prove that birds actually use the mechanism. And researchers aligned with a competing model say they are not convinced.

But by identifying for the first time a molecule that reacts to very weak magnetic fields, the experiments prove the plausibility of a long-hypothesized method of avian navigation that has had a credibility problem because no one had ever found a molecule with the required sensitivity.

As fat people have an abundance of fat tissue, the natural assumption is that fat people have more fat cells, or ‘adipocytes’. That’s only part of the story - it turns out that overweight and obese people not only have a surplus of fat cells, they have larger ones too.
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During adulthood, about 8% of fat cells die every year only to be replaced by new ones. As a result, adults have a constant number of fat cells, even those who lose masses of weight. Instead, it’s changes in the volume of fat cells that causes body weight to rise and fall.
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we couldn’t have a clearer indication of the importance of childhood as a window for preventing obesity and the chronic diseases affected by it - cancer, heart disease, diabetes and more.

The message is especially stark following the recent Foresight report, which estimated that if current trends are left unchecked, by 2050 a quarter of all UK children under the age of 16 will be obese. The knowledge that their fat cell count will then be set for life makes the cost of inaction even higher. Fortunately, it seems that the UK Government is taking appropriate steps and recently pledged over a third of a billion pounds on a concerted strategy to tackle childhood obesity.

Next to beneficial insects, songbirds consume the most pest insects in your yard. Robins, blackbirds, flickers and starlings will eat a lot of webworms if they are in your lawn. Many seed-eating birds prey on caterpillars while raising their young. Encourage birds to settle in or near your yard and prey on fleas by offering them food, water, and shelter.

The American Robin eats both fruit and invertebrates. Earthworms are important during the breeding season, but fruit is the main diet during winter. Robins eat different types of food depending on the time of day; they eat earthworms early in the day and more fruit later in the day.

The information provided here was generated by a survey conducted by the Apiary Inspectors of America. They took the survey in January and February this year, and in the process, gathered information from 18% of the colonies in the U.S.

The survey found that about 35% of all the colonies in the U.S. died last winter. Of those that died, 71% died of natural causes, 29% from symptoms that are suspect colony collapse disorder. Doing the math that comes to at least 10% of all the bees in the U.S. last year died of Colony Collapse Disorder.
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Considering all these factors, undue concern over IAPV detection is not warranted. While IAPV’s role in colony losses remains a priority in ongoing research, we do know that high levels of other common bee viruses, such as KBV, DWV, and ABPV, have also been linked with certain incidences of high colony mortality or decline in worker numbers. We also know that nearly all bee colonies are infected with at least one type of virus and that all these viruses are potentially pathogenic.

Only a year ago, an Auburn University research entomologist encountered a phenomenon that beggared description - 16 super-sized yellow jacket nests throughout central and south Alabama.

By the end of the summer, the number of reported nests increased to more than 80. Auburn researcher Dr. Charles Ray speculates there probably were hundreds more undetected nests throughout the state. One nest collector spotted 10 of these nests in Lowndes County alone, while an Alabama Cooperative Extension System agent in Covington County reported as many as 25 nests.

Why were these gigantic nests considered such oddities? Because entomologists such as Ray could go an entire career without seeing scarcely one of these huge nests. This year, though, the nests seem to have vanished as quickly as dissipating clouds. Working closely with Alabama Extension agents and other monitors throughout the state, Ray hasn’t turned up so much as one nest this year.

“The summer of 2006 may prove to be a once in a lifetime opportunity,” say Ray, who considers the discovery of the nests one of the high points of his career. So what accounts for this once in a lifetime occurrence? Ray speculates it had to do with an unusually mild 2006 winter. “The mid-20s was about as cold as it got that year - only about a day or two of really cold weather,” says Ray, adding that this extremely mild winter probably established optimal conditions for the yellow jackets the following spring.

For the 2007 awards, 99 middle school and high school math and science teachers are receiving this recognition. In the citation from the president, winners are commended “for embodying excellence in teaching, for devotion to the learning needs of the students, and for upholding the high standards that exemplify American education at its finest.”

Each winner receives a $10,000 award from NSF, as well as a trip for two to Washington, D.C., for a week of celebratory events and professional development activities.

Among the activities during that week are a day with scientists and science educators at NSF; meetings with members of Congress and federal agency leadership; and a reception and dinner at the U.S. Department of State featuring guest speaker Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, a NASA Astronaut-Mission Specialist.