La Mode Verte
Environmental Awareness Through Media ProductionsArchive for University of Montana
US Military Discover Answer to Why the Bees are Dying
www.nytimes.co.uk 6th October 2010
It is a phenomena that has received a lot of attention but up until now, the actual cause of the drastic decline in honeybee populations in the USA has been elusive. Since 2006, 20-40% of bee colonies have collapsed prompting accusations against pesticides and GM foods. Now, an unlikely partnership between the US military and bee experts from the University of Montana have unveiled another theory. According to a paper published in the academic journal PLoS One, the researchers have blamed the interaction of a fungus and a virus for the decline in bee populations. Although the exact way in which the double-act effects the bees is unknown (the next stage of the study focuses on this), several factors indicate that bee nutrition is involved in some way. This is not the first time the US military has been interested in bees. With the help of the same University of Montana, the army has carried out research on the bee’s ability to detect landmines.
Rising Temperatures in Southern Hemisphere is Causing Soils to Dry Up
e360.yale.edu 11th October 2010
Quoted from source:
‘Soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere have been drying up in the past decade as temperatures have risen in Australia, Africa, and South America, according to the first major study of evapotranspiration on a global basis. The study found that from 1982 to 1998, the evaporation of water from the soil and plants to the atmosphere increased steadily in the Southern Hemisphere as temperatures climbed. But beginning in 1998, the rates of evaporation slowed dramatically in many parts of the Southern Hemisphere as soils became increasingly dry, an indication that the planet’s water cycle is being pushed to the limit, according to the study by U.S. scientists, which was published in the journal Nature. In some regions, rising temperatures have simply removed all of the available moisture from the ground, said Steve Running, an ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula and one of the researchers involved in the study. While the moisture returns to the land in the form of rainfall, it often falls in different regions of the planet, leaving some regions increasingly dry, he said.’
