Loss and deterioraton of indigenous habitat increasingly affect natural populations worldwide. As a result of these processes, new selection pressures are imposed upon organisms, increasing local extinction rates. Simultaneously, reduced movement among remnant patches lowers colonisation rates and affects demographic and genetic population parameters. Yet, organisms with comparable life histories often respond to habitat disturbance in various ways. Why so is a matter of great importance to evolution

Emergency management teams, faced with an approaching hurricane, can access GIS map data through voice and gestures for real-time decision making on issues ranging from protecting hazardous materials sites to evacuating assisted-living facilities by using a computer system developed by Penn State researchers.

The research team says the system also can assist planners and transportation engineers visualize the impacts of potential developments and highways as well as help crisis management pe

Seeing is believing, unless you’re blind or visually impaired. To this group, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says, “feeling is believing.”
Computer scientists and engineers at NIST have created a tactile graphic display that brings electronic images to the blind and visually impaired in the same way that Braille makes words readable.

The new imaging device was developed at NIST by the same research team that recently created an electronic Braille reader.

Researchers in Finland are working to develop a comprehensive, multidisciplinary model of the carbon cycle and its impacts on climate change in northern ecosystems. The focus of work in the Academy of Finland’s Global Change Research Programme (FIGARE) has been on the uptake and release of carbon in different ecosystem reservoirs, the atmosphere, vegetation, trees, forest land and lakes.

‘The carbon dioxide content in the earth’s atmosphere is slowly and steadily increasing. Given the resul

Researchers studying the Hedgehog signaling pathway have identified small molecules that could form the foundations of exciting new treatments for Parkinson’s disease and certain cancers. New research published in Journal of Biology – the open access journal for exceptional research – has identified small molecules that are able to stimulate or block the Hedgehog signalling pathway, which is essential to the development, maintenance and repair of cells in the human body. The potential o

A fraction of a second after the Big Bang, all the primordial soup of matter in the Universe was `broken` into its most fundamental constituents. It was thought to have disappeared forever. However scientists strongly suspect that the exotic soup of dissolved matter can still be found in today`s Universe, in the core of certain very dense objects called neutron stars.

With ESA`s space telescope XMM-Newton, they are now closer to testing this idea. For the first time, XMM-Newton has been able