Weekly Roundup | Earth and Nature: Top 20 stories of the week of Aug 25th - Sept 1st, 2016
If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children. - Confucius
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1 +17y+ ago
How Ants Make Gardens in the Sky
You probably think of ants as living in those dusty little hills that you accidentally kick on the sidewalk. But high above neotropical rain forests, certain ants create elaborate nests. The ants share their nest with numerous species of epiphytes, AKA non-parasitic plants that grow on other plants. Some of these plants only grow in or near ant nests. Clearly, these ant gardens are not ordinary anthills.
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Submitted on August 28th 2016 by gladsdotter
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2 +17y+ ago
People enhanced the environment, not degraded it, over past 13,000 years
Human occupation is usually associated with deteriorated landscapes, but new research shows that 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia’s coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity. Andrew Trant, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, led the study in partnership with the University of Victoria and the Hakai Institute. The research combined remote-sensed, ecological and archaeological data from coastal sites where First Nations’ have lived for millennia.
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Submitted on August 31st 2016 by geoleo with 13 comments and with 1 Related Links:
1. Intertidal resource use over millennia enhances forest productivity Added by NomadiChris on August 31st 2016.
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3 +17y+ ago
The Mammoth Pirates
In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush is under way.
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Submitted on August 25th 2016 by geoleo
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4 +17y+ ago
Solar powered pipe desalinates seawater into drinkable fluid.
For the 2016 land art generator initiative, Khalili engineers propose a solar powered pipe to desalinate seawater into drinkable fluid.
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Submitted on August 29th 2016 by Appaloosa with 4 comments
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5 +17y+ ago
The National Park Service just turned 100. We visited one of its filthiest, most forgotten sites
Dead Horse Bay, the National Park Service site where the waves clink with broken glass, is a reminder of New York City's brutal past.
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Submitted on August 25th 2016 by Appaloosa
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6 +17y+ ago
Interactive Map Shows where Animals will Move Under Climate Change
Scientists predict that as Earth warms and climate patterns morph in response, animals will be forced to move to survive. That usually means hightailing it to higher latitudes as equatorial areas become too hot and dry.
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Submitted on August 30th 2016 by jcscher with 2 comments and with 1 Related Links:
1. Migrations In Motion Added by jcscher on August 30th 2016.
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7 +17y+ ago
Archaeologists are fuming over a new study about how early hominin Lucy died
It’s not every day that researchers crack a case this cold. Lucy, the iconic hominin found in present-day Ethiopia, died 3.18 million years ago. Her cause of death has remained a mystery since her remains were first discovered in 1974.
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Submitted on August 30th 2016 by kxh with 1 Related Links:
1. A 3.2-Million-Year-Old Mystery: Did Lucy Fall From a Tree? Added by gladsdotter on August 30th 2016.
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8 +17y+ ago
Dogs Understand Human Words and Intonation
Dogs have the ability to distinguish words and the intonation of human speech through brain regions similar to those that humans use, a study in the 2 September issue of Science reports. The results reveal important insights into the neural networks needed to understand speech, hinting that perhaps both humans and dogs may have relied on similar networks that were already in place before language evolved, and later adapted to process speech.
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Submitted on August 30th 2016 by zyery
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9 +17y+ ago
Surface Water Shifting Around the Earth
Scientists have used satellite images to study how the water on the Earth's surface has changed over the last 30 years.
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Submitted on August 25th 2016 by jcscher
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10 +17y+ ago
Researchers discover how human immune receptors become activated in the presence of harmful substances
In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Animal Farm, as the barnyard devolves into chaos the slogan "all animals are equal" quickly becomes "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others". The same might be true for the tiny immune receptors scattered across the surface of our T-cells. Before now, it was unclear how these complex molecular receptors recognised harmful invaders (or antigens) and sent warning signals into the cell. It was largely assumed that "all receptors were equal".
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Submitted on August 30th 2016 by wildcard
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11 +17y+ ago
Elephants are the end of a 60m-year lineage – last of the megaherbivores
Four-tuskers, hoe-tuskers, shovel-tuskers are all wiped out – now only a fragment of this keystone species remains. By Patrick Barkham. (Aug. 12, 2016)
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Submitted on August 28th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 4 comments
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12 +17y+ ago
Watch a Wasp Take Control of a Cockroach’s Brain
A video captures the dark side of insect mind control. By Katherine Harmon Courage.
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Submitted on August 28th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 2 comments
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13 +17y+ ago
A lightning strike killed 323 reindeer, and this is the ghastly aftermath
It was the deadliest -- and probably eeriest -- strike ever recorded.
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Submitted on August 29th 2016 by LisMan
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14 +17y+ ago
The Belief in Human Supremacy Is Destroying Our Planet
Right now the University of Michigan Wolverines football team is hosting the Minnesota Golden Gophers. More than 100,000 humans are attending this football game. More than 100,000 humans have attended every Michigan home football game since 1975. There used to be real wolverines in Michigan. One was sighted there in 2004, the first time in 200 years. That wolverine died in 2010.More people in Michigan—“The Wolverine State”—care about the Michigan Wolverines football team than care about real wolverines.This is human supremacism.
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Submitted on August 30th 2016 by spaceghoti
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15 +17y+ ago
How do animals see in the dark?
To human eyes, the world at night is a formless canvas of grey. Many nocturnal animals, on the other hand, experience a rich and varied world, bursting with details, shapes, and colors. What is it, then, that separates moths from men? Anna Stöckl uncovers the science behind night vision.
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Submitted on August 25th 2016 by gladsdotter
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16 +17y+ ago
Whale Shark Seeks Help - Video
Australian fisherman saves a whale shark from an almost certain death in an act of intelligence and kindness Whale shark asks fishermen for help
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Submitted on August 26th 2016 by kxh
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17 +17y+ ago
Gardens: living flypaper
Carnivorous plants to take down insect pests
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Submitted on August 30th 2016 by gladsdotter with 1 comments
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18 +17y+ ago
U.S.Northeast Farmers Grapple With Worst Drought In More Than A Decade
This year, many fields are bone dry — and that has many farmers in the region thinking about how to manage their land, their animals and the water that is there.
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Submitted on August 30th 2016 by jcscher
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19 +17y+ ago
Blood in Honduras, Silence in the United States
By Lauren Carasik. (Aug. 16, 2016)
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Submitted on August 28th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 1 comments and with 2 Related Links:
1. Inside the School of the Americas, Part 2 of 2 [Video] Added by AdelleChattre on August 28th 2016.
2. Inside the School of the Americas, Part 1 of 2 [Video] Added by AdelleChattre on August 29th 2016.
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20 +17y+ ago
World's oldest known fossils push evidence for life back by 220 million years
The oldest fossils known to date have been discovered in 3.7 billion-year-old rocks in Greenland by an Australian-led team of researchers.
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Submitted on August 31st 2016 by kxh with 1 comments
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Here are this week's top five Earth & Nature tribes:
/t/extremeweather 34 posts, 22 comments, 121 votes.
/t/environment 41 posts, 27 comments, 197 votes.
/t/animals 38 posts, 19 comments, 152 votes.
/t/weather 35 posts, 22 comments, 93 votes.
/t/climate 35 posts, 20 comments, 110 votes.
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