Courtesy of UAlberta News University of Alberta researchers have developed guidelines that are being used by the timber industry and government foresters to get a jump on climate change when planting trees. Maps developed by Laura Gray, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Renewable Resources at the U of A, provide projections of climatically suitable habitat [...]

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Courtesy of Penn State News Changing the way a plant forms cellulose may lead to more efficient, less expensive biofuel production, according to Penn State engineers. “What every biofuel manufacturer wants to do is to get to the sugars,” said Jeffrey Catchmark, associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering. “But the structure of cellulose itself [...]

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Courtesy of UC San Diego News The tail of a seahorse can be compressed to about half its size before permanent damage occurs, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. The tail’s exceptional flexibility is due to its structure, made up of bony, armored plates, which slide past each other. Researchers are [...]

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Courtesy of UC Berkeley A new report on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in California warns of the risks of irreversible contamination of surface and groundwater near oil drilling sites, unless the technique is carefully monitored and controlled. The report Regulation of Hydraulic Fracturing in California: A Wastewater and Water Quality Perspective is an independent analysis produced [...]

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Courtesy of the University of Melbourne The first continental-scale reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2000 years has found 20th Century warming was a global event that has produced the hottest global average temperature in 1400 years. The study by 78 scientists from 24 countries was published in Nature Geoscience and combined Northern and Southern [...]

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University of Alberta biologist Stan Boutin uses a simple analogy to describe a breakthrough research paper on the behaviour of squirrels. “You try to prepare your kids for what they’ll face when they get out in the big, real world,” said Boutin. “Female squirrels in our study were doing that too for their offspring.” Boutin is the [...]

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Courtesy of The University of British Columbia News A rare double-barrier reef in the Philippines is facing grave threats and urgently needs increased protection, according to new photographic evidence released today by a team of marine conservationists and photographers organized by Project Seahorse, a partnership of the University of British Columbia and the Zoological Society [...]

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Courtesy of University of Alberta News Dinosaurs are long extinct but their role in understanding life on Earth in the 21st century is vital, says a dinosaur researcher at the University of Alberta. “Humans have been around for about 200,000 years; dinosaurs ruled for Earth for 160 million years,” says U of A paleontologist Scott Persons. [...]

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Courtesy of Arizona State University News Governet, innovators of technology solutions for higher education institutions, announced today that Arizona State University, renowned for its academic leadership and achievements in sustainability, will adopt CurricUNET Meta, the award-winning online curriculum management system as part of its ongoing effort to reduce paper consumption and save resources. Currently serving [...]

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The Worth of Water from ASU Research on Vimeo. The story of the American West is a story of water, and of our Herculean efforts to capture and spread that water across an arid landscape. As our western cities continue to grow, however, we need to find ways to curb our thirst. In this mini-documentary, [...]

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