Search Results for: ocean

Future potential for the production of new wonder drugs – including anti-cancer agents – from marine animals and plants, is under threat according to biodiversity expert Professor Carlo Heip, speaking at the European marine science and ocean technology conference EurOCEAN 2004 in Galway, today.

According to Professor Heip, marine biodiversity – the richness of life in the sea – is being undermined by overfishing, pollution, the introduction of exotic or alien species from other countries, by

Seas and oceans are a vital resource for Europe and the world, particularly in terms of fishing and extracting minerals. But our oceans are now under intense pressure from over-exploitation and more than ever need to be managed in a sustainable way. To help ensure the protection and sustainable use of marine resources, 500 leading scientists, policy makers and other stakeholders will meet today, and for three days, at the EUROCEAN2004 conference in Galway (Ireland). The Commission will present lates

IRD scientists have revealed, in an article just published in Nature, that the cooling event known in the Northern Hemisphere as the Younger Dryas (about 12 000 years B.P.) was expressed in the Pacific by the absence of any South Pacific Convergence Zone activity and the movement of tropical waters closer to the Equator. This observation shows the interaction which occurs between the low and high latitudes and provides boundaries relevant for building ocean-atmosphere climatic models. Geochemical ana

A “dead zone,” like the Stephen King novel of the same name, is a place where life can end. The horror meister probably wasn’t thinking about fish.

Dead zones are areas of the ocean where marine life – especially large quantities of fish – mysteriously die and where future marine life may never have a chance.

One well-known dead zone is near the Mississippi River delta area, where the nearby Sabine and Atchafalaya Rivers flow into southern Louisiana. Texas A&M University at G

A team of expert marine biologists and chemists has carried out research which proves for the first time that oceans and shores are contaminated with microscopic fragments and fibres of plastic.

Eight scientists from the Universities of Southampton and Plymouth and the Plymouth-based Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science have today (Friday 7 May) published their findings in the prestigious international journal Science.

The article ’Lost at Sea: Where Is All the Plasti

Hundreds of stretches of DNA may be so critical to life’s machinery that they have been “ultra-conserved” throughout hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Researchers have found precisely the same sequences in the genomes of humans, rats, and mice; sequences that are 95 to 99 percent identical to these can be found in the chicken and dog genomes, as well.

Most of these ultra-conserved regions do not appear to code for proteins, but may instead play a regulatory role. Evolutionary