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Scientists have developed a new system that uses basic information about the ecology of “vector” borne diseases – malaria, Lyme disease or some of the new emerging diseases such as Avian flu – to mathematically predict how they might change, spread and pose new risks to human health.

The approach, developed by researchers from Oregon State University and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, could become enormously valuable to agencies that are trying to understand what a disease might d

The Vanuatu island arc, in the South-West Pacific, is 1 700 km long. It corresponds to a convergence zone where the Australian plate is slipping eastwards under the North Fiji Basin, which is part of the Pacific plate, thus generating earthquakes. On 26 November 1999, the central islands of Vanuatu, particularly Ambrym and Pentecost, were strongly shaken by a 7.5 magnitude surface earthquake followed by a tsunami. The earthquake and the many landslips it generated caused 10 deaths and considerable d

Visible from ESA’s Proba spacecraft 600 kilometres away in space are the largest of the many Nasca Lines; ancient desert markings now at risk from human encroachment as well as flood events feared to be increasing in frequency.

Designated a World Heritage Site in 1994, the Lines are a mixture of animal figures and long straight lines etched across an area of about 70 km by 30 km on the Nasca plain, between the Andes and Pacific Coast at the southern end of Peru. The oldest lines date from a

A compound currently used to treat patients with severe sepsis also protects brain cells in an unexpected way, say researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in the Feb. 19 issue of the journal Neuron.

Doctors currently use a modified version of activated protein C or APC to reduce inflammation or increase blood flow in patients with severe sepsis, and last year neuroscientist Berislav Zlokovic, M.D., Ph.D., led a team that showed that the compound also protects the cells tha

A growing body of evidence questions calculations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the land will automatically provide a significant, long-term carbon “sink” to offset some of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists reported these findings today at the 2004 AAAS (Triple-A-S) Annual Meeting.

The latest information about carbon dioxide fertilization – by which plants soak up carbon from the atmosphere – “really paints a different picture of the way the world w

In a few decades, it’s likely that scientists will look back at the early part of the 21st century and regard it as a fundamental stage in understanding the importance of the effects of aerosols on Earth’s climate. In fact, it was in this time period, they may say, that aerosols were first found to be as climatologically significant as greenhouse gases.

Aerosols, tiny atmospheric particles made up of various elements and produced by a range of sources, have become a prominent conc