Ecology and the Environment

How do you quantify the impact microbial interaction has as a selective pressure or stabilizer for any giving species?

out of curiosity, i was wondering if music can have an effect on a plants growth, if you give it all the same growing conditions but change the music will it grow differently? >

Got this on my discovery news. sounds pretty cool. March 4, 2008 -- Soap is so 20th century. Scientists in Indiana, Wisconsin and Australia have developed nanotechnology-based coatings that clean themselves and could be used in everything from silk shirts to windshields. Besides the added convenience, the new materials could reduce the use of environmentally destructive cleaners while killing potentially deadly bacteria. The three teams of scientists took different approaches to self-cleaning materials. Clothes "with self-cleaning properties will become a standard feature of future textiles," said Walid Daoud, a scientist at the University of Monash in Au…

Hi, I wish to know if there are firms that sell online big and ecologic toothpaste packages. In Italy there are only 100ml pakages while abroad is possible find big packages, for example at supermarket. Is it true? Thanks __________________ new same old junk products (rigattiere originale on italian language)

I thought folks here might find this story interesting. Apparently Virgin Atlantic ran run one of its 747s on 20% biofuel (80% regular avgas) today on a no-passengers run from London to Amsterdam. http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/187798,virgin-atlantic-boeing-makes-first-bio-fuelled-flight.html

Give me your opinions I think it will get colder in Scandinavia because when the ice melts in the North Pole the gulf stream will get colder and it will be colder than before without the warmth of the Gulf Stream. The deserts will expand. I actually have some friends in Australia and they are farmers. They have a lot pf problems because there was nearly no rain at all!! I would love to get your opinions on global warming. Does it effect the way you live?

How do humans truly know they are conscious? I mean you can look at various other animals and watch them going about being animals of a type and say hey its a zebrafish or its just a turtle, its does turtle things, it has turtle thoughts. So how do we know really that we just don’t do human things, only see human things and generally also just be an animal? I mean it may sound like an odd question but I have always thought about it. How do we know we are truly some sentient all conscious being? How do we know for sure we live outside of biologic influence in regards to thought and behavior? It would seem that the existence of the brain provides the basis for a m…

I am trying to get how much the ecosystem services are valued by local communities surrounding a mountain range. and i want some opinions on what method is best to adopt. Contingent valuation method would ask respondents directly on how much they are willing to pay for an ecosystem service. Contingent ranking would make them rank the ecosystem services including a good with a money price for threshold according to preference. The communities might have some people who can't read nor write so i might conduct an interview or explain the questionnaire to them. I think the first method is more susceptible to biases. However, the second method would require a …

This is an oldish interview but I thought it was interesting. Landclearing & Rainfall in W.A Saturday 17 July 2004 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s1152730.htm "Alexandra de Blas: So basically because of the colour and the roughness, you’ve got more convection over the native veg, and therefore you get more clouds and more rain? Tom Lyons: You certainly get more clouds, and then some recent modelling studies done by Andy Pitman at Macquarie University has taken those results and put them into a numerical model to compare what’s happened with pre-European vegetation and the current vegetation, and those modelling results show quite clea…

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3292050.ece What do you guys make of this? Oh, and here's a jpeg image that shows all the various epoches from the distant past to today: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00276/an385_276938a.jpg

Is there anything to the sunspot theory of global warming.

our earth become not behave so 'nice' for all these years. it seem that almost every year many things had been destroyed by the nature e.g. heavy rain, tornado etc. i'm quite shocked with my beautiful country, malaysia, when the Peninsular Malaysia, suddenly got flooded by he heavy rain. i think it's the first time happened. nowadays, sometimes i can predicted the weather. as you can see that early in the morning, it was really hot, which is good (for certain people), but in the late evening, it's getting rain here. it make me confuse. as an environmental science student who really-really want to know, give me a precisely explanation what r really happen rite now?!!!!

I found this site posted at another forum. What this is is a "calculator" that basically measures the impact your habits have on the environment. And not just your carbon footprint. It asks you a series of questions, ranging from car usage to daily recycling habits, and then it gives you the result based on number of planets (meaning it tells you that you are living as if there were X amount of Earths available). It's based on the UK statistics, but that's ok because it only serves to provide a perspective. You can try it out here: http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/ ===================== BTW, I rated 2.22 Earths. While certainly less than most people (according to U…

Here is a concept I thought up. I would think that you could make smaller, say maybe melon size or grapefruit sized mini reactors. These can be used from a material point of view in construction to aid nuclear reactions of some type, I would hopefully think fission. Now that reason I hope you could use the nanotech is again to aid the reaction from any possible point on a material scale, but to aid in controlling it to possibly higher levels of detail. You could link of many of these say units of reaction to create or sustain a certain level of reaction by controlling the extent of the reaction. The containers could also be designed to integrate desires to handle nucl…

Hey I need a really quick answer to this question: Is there more or less oxygen in the air when near large bodies of water?

"Abstract View" "PLANT ASSEMBLAGE COMPOSITION EXPLAINS AND PREDICTS HOW BIODIVERSITY AFFECTS SALT MARSH FUNCTIONING" "Evidence for strong species selection effects led us to predict that three species would eventually dominate our parallel field experiment that tested the same assemblages. Exactly that happened in nine years, but (we predict) without losing function, because the site retained the three highest-performing species. Biodiversity loss was nonrandom in the field, and because trios with two top performers sustained critical functions in the greenhouse, we predict that many functions will not decline, even if the salt marsh becomes dominated by a single speci…

Although I do love volcanoes, esp hot lava like all kids, there are also other threats to the environment. For example here is a link to a story about the new Tata Nano... "Tata Nano, world's cheapest new car, is unveiled in India" http://driving.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/driving/article3164205.ece Just what the world needs.....a billion more people driving cars.....and in this case they are powered by 2 cycle engines. I do admit feeling torn about this because I already have mine (x2 cars). And I know 2 cycle is cheaper, but couldn't they have made it a 4 cycle? Great strides have been made in small 4 cycle engine technology recently...including weig…

Several of the topics in this forum have to do with climate modeling, particularly as it pertains to global warming. In these forum topics I and others have suggested that these models be verified by demonstrating an ability to closely track well know past climate events. So for example: Can current climate models track and explain the little ice age from beginning to end? Can current climate models track and explain the medieval warm period from beginning to end? Can current climate models track and explain the Holocene climatic optimum from beginning to end? Are such questions reasonable? Why or why not? It seems to me that part of verifying any…

serious ?: is it possible to make shapes out of clouds using cloud seeding ? me and a group of people saw shapes in the sky the color of clouds that i wont get into that i have always dismissed as having a human component to.. i was hoping i could get verification that it is possible to create distinct shapes through cloud seeding thank you

Not sure which topic to throw this under, but I thought this may turn out to be an interesting piece of the global warming puzzle... Oil: A renewable resource? It is an interesting theory... what I find most interesting in the theory is the three potentials for CH4 in the Earth's crust. I have to wonder whether draws on one carbon reservoir affects the availability (or production) of the other? It would seem that given the three potentials (CO2+steam, Natural Gas, Crude Oil) are produced under great pressure that a draw down of one would affect the production of the other two. This could be why we see huge influxes of oil in tapped reserves, but we never se…

Is there any strong sets of chemical data available on any attempts to experiment or recreate say compositional differences with the existing layers of the atmosphere? I don’t want to look at say the evolution of its various layers just more or less differences with them as they existed in time together. *Physically speaking can you ignore the history of a system? TO what extent in regards to say this question. I just want to ignore I guess the “time-evolution” of the atmosphere to certain bounds in its past, how do I subtract out the history? This question is purely bonus.

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html Well, not really... but Michael Crichton has attempted to relate the Drake Equation to the mathematics underlying climate science, specifically in regard to making outrageous predictions about the future...

in my absence from theses forums, I've done quite a bit of studying. i also had the pleasure of reading a original copy of Charles Darwin's, Origin of Species. a fascinating book to say the least. it got me thinking about diseases and survival of the fittest. the people who a virus or bacteria kills shows quite clearly that they did not have sufficient immune responses to fight back the pathogen. yet as some die of diseases like Ebola, others survive. although not without some long tern effects from what I've read. thats survival of the fittest from a purely biological point of view given that there is currently no cure for Ebola that I'm aware of(please correct me…

Dear all, Is is possible to create an artificial sunlight? Even though not in our time. As we all know the sun is dying, and one day we all will be living in dark and cold planet. If somehow human can create an artificial sunlight, we might have some chances of surviving? Please comment...

Basically, carbon-offset companies want to pump tons of fertilizer into the oceans in to encourage algael blooms. The idea should be pretty familiar to anyone who's taken high school biology: In certain ocean environments there are limiting resources that keep algae populations from growing any larger. What this plan does is increase the amount of those limiting resources so you get more algae. Why you ask? So that the algae will sequester greenhouse gases. Great, you say. Well, besides the obviously treacherous ecological ground we're tramping about on here, much of the carbon that the algae sequester is just going to get eaten up by predators or release in shallow …