Researchers based at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand have found that migrating humpback whales achieve navigational precision usually associated with jetliners or arrows.
Japan's cabinet approved almost US$50 billion of spending for post-earthquake rebuilding, the country's biggest public works effort in six decades. The emergency budget of 4 trillion Yen, which is likely be followed by more reconstruction spending packages, is still dwarfed by the overall cost of damages caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, estimated at US$300 billion.
New studies undertaken by Universidad Católica and Universidad de Chile have identified the five most active fault lines in Chile in the hopes of protecting people from future earthquake damage.
The Antarctic ozone hole is about one-third to blame for Australia's recent series of droughts, scientists say. Writing in in the journal Science, they conclude that the hole has shifted wind and rainfall patterns right across the Southern Hemisphere, even the tropics.
Humpback whales, once hunted nearly to extinction, started returning to Chilean seas in the 1990s. By 2003 so many had appeared that Chile created a protected coastal area, Francisco Coloane with marine park in it to assure the whales would have the nutrients they need to thrive.
Turbulence generated by speeding motor boats kills significant numbers of zooplankton, a study has revealed for the first time. Experiments on copepods, tiny crustaceans that live and float in water, show that a third die in waters frequented by propeller-driven boats. That is significantly more than in bodies of water not used by boats.
Google Inc. said announced this week that together with two Japanese partners they will pay General Electric Co. about 500 million US dollars for a majority equity stake in the world's largest wind farm, under construction in Oregon.
Male humpback whales have their own version of the hit parade, researchers say. Within regional populations of the whales, males all sing the same mating song. But the pattern of the song changes over time, with new versions spreading across the ocean and nearly always from west to east, according to the study published online this month in the journal Current Biology.
Arctic coastlines are crumbling away and retreating at the rate of two metres or more a year due to the effects of climate change, it has been claimed. In some locations, up to 30 metres of the shore has been vanishing every year.
Paraguay’s Minister of Public Health Esperanza Martinez acknowledged on Tuesday that the current mosquito transmitted dengue epidemic is far more severe than that of 2007, considered the worst in recent times, and claimed she has had limited support from city councils