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Home / News / Tags / forest
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Researchers from MIT discovered that trees carry a small amount of electrical power, and they founded a company which would harness it and use it as a source of power.Through their newly-founded Voltree company, the scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to tap on tree energy and use it ... |
2 October 2008
03:58 GMT |
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The Rights and Resource Initiative warns that by 2030 yet another massive chunk of the tropical rainforest will be gone in favor of agriculture as the demand for food and biofuels increases. The organization also points out that the governments of developing countries are rather reluctant in applying any reforms at a... |
14 July 2008
09:46 GMT |
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It seems that the effect is not manifested only on populations, but on individuals as well. Many of the subtropical environments with high moisture levels have significantly different foliages, some being heavily covered with forests while others have almost no wood at all. Johanna Delgado-Acevedo and Carla Restrepo ... |
27 May 2008
10:23 GMT |
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Sloths really deserve their name: 11 % of the sloths move only 38 m (126 ft) daily, and 38 % of them cannot move at all for 24 hours. Captive two-toed sloths are active about 7 hours each day. Moreover, coming to increase the impression of laziness is the fact that, since sloths are nocturnal, they just sleep or doze... |
15 May 2008
02:44 GMT |
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The real woodpeckers may not be able to put on performances like Woody the Woodpecker, but they still make a special group of birds nonetheless. 1. The closest relatives of the woodpeckers are the honeyguides. Out of 204 species of woodpeckers, only the two species of wrynecks (Jynx) do not drill and drum the wood. T... |
9 May 2008
09:02 GMT |
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1. Hornbills are famous for their huge bills, flattened and curved, with toothed edges and bony helmets over the upper jaw. These large birds have a common origin with the hoopoes. Today, hornbills inhabit only tropical Africa and Asia, but the oldest known species, the Geiseloceros robustus, lived in Saxony (norther... |
8 May 2008
10:00 GMT |
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The world's most beautiful tiger is at the same time the smallest: the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae). This tiger subspecies inhabits the island of Sumatra and is today reduced to a number of 600-800 individuals. The Siberian tiger is the largest cat ever to exist, measuring up to 2.8 m (9.3 ft) witho... |
23 April 2008
10:00 GMT |
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Wild spaces are crucial for the survival of the planet: they contribute to the maintenance of the clime variation, rainfall and snowfall, but, most important, they are a reserve for preserving the biodiversity. With the increasing of human activity, the last wild spaces of the planet are fast disappearing under the a... |
17 April 2008
09:39 GMT |
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Until 1951, nobody knew the source of the Orinoco River. Accumulating continuously torrents and rivers, Orinoco grows gradually while heading northward through the territory of Venezuela on over 2,000 km (1,250 mi) of thick jungle. In some places, the waters of Orinoco are as big as those of the Amazon and discharge ... |
11 April 2008
17:51 GMT |
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The Sino-Tibetan mountainous chain, also called the "the Alps of Sichuan", are located between Tibet and China. The highest peak is Gongga (7,556 m or 25,186 ft), China's highest peak outside Himalaya, located in the Hengduan Mountains. The Sino-Tibetan chain is the place on Earth where the terrestrial crust exp... |
11 April 2008
08:46 GMT |
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Doņana National Park is located in southwestern Spain, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. It was created in 1969, initially having a surface of 37,000 hectares. In 1978, the park was augmented to 50,720 hectares, to which 26,540 hectares of protected areas, located at its periphery, are added.The park is in a co... |
9 April 2008
10:09 GMT |
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So far, scientists have known about some salamanders (of the family Plethodontidae) and caecilians (worm-like amphibians) that had lost their lungs. Now they can add a frog on the list of lungless tetrapod vertebrates: the Kalimantan jungle toad (Barbourula kalimantanensis). This amphibian takes all the oxygen it ne... |
8 April 2008
03:56 GMT |
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These are the world's smallest monkeys. The marmosets (22 species are found in Brazil and few in adjacent tropical countries) live in both dry and wet forests. Most of them have a body 25 cm (10 in) long, with a 35 cm (14 in) long tail, while the weight is around 250 grams (0.55 pounds). The long tail, used for ... |
1 April 2008
10:10 GMT |
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One of the wonders of the American southwest is found in northeastern Arizona: an enormous petrified forest, a real geological treasure the scientists learned about to the end of the 19th century. Petrified Forest National Park from Arizona comprises a surface of 218,533 acres (341.5 sq mi; 885 kmē) of petrified wood... |
20 March 2008
10:19 GMT |
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One of the main Bantu tribes in central Africa is represented by the Fangs, who inhabit Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and Gabon. The Fangs came from Nigeria recently, during the Bantu expansion. Fang legends speak about terrible battles their ancestors fought against warriors covered by long clothes and riding horses. ... |
26 February 2008
15:21 GMT |
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The most spectacular calcareous relief in the world could be considered the Chinese Stone Forest. The Stone Forest National Park of Shilin-Lunan (Yunnan) is located in the Lunan Yu Autonomous County, 126 km (79 mi) southeast of Kunming, at altitudes of 1,700-2,000 m. It has an area of over 340 square km (135 square m... |
26 February 2008
08:51 GMT |
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1. Japan is an archipelago made of 4 large islands: Honshū (the "mainland"), Shikoku, Kyūshū and Hokkaidō, and by numerous small islands and islets. The center of the country is crosses by the Japanese Alps, volcanic mountains that make 80 % of the surface of the country and which reach the highe... |
14 February 2008
11:11 GMT |
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In the 21th century, when we thought that all that is larger than a mouse has already been described by zoologists, the surprises keep coming. A new species of uakari monkey has been described in the International Journal of Primatology. Its discoverer is the New Zealand primatologist Jean-Phillipe Boubli of the Univ... |
6 February 2008
05:09 GMT |
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This is what happens when art and advanced technology collide. The Funky Forest project, developed by Theodore and Emily Gobeille, is one of the most interactive and crazy stuff for kids I've ever seen, as it consists of a cool interactive ecosystem where children can create trees and flowers using their own bod... |
14 January 2008
10:04 GMT |
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1.A rain forest represents an explosion of life, the peak of biological diversity on Earth. But the trees that make the current rainforest emerged during the Cretaceous, at the sunset of the dinosaur realm. So, when did the first rainforest appear? And how did it look like?The underground workings of a coalmine, in ... |
20 December 2007
10:23 GMT |
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Most cats are chicken enough not to face regular rats. But this rat would fight from equal to equal with a cat. An expedition made by an American-Indonesian team in a remote jungle in western New Guinea, in the area Papua province of Indonesia, has found a giant rat and a tiny possum that seem to be new undescribed ... |
18 December 2007
05:01 GMT |
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Waiting for Rudolph to bring you Santa Claus with the presents? Well, here is some data about this amazing Ice Age deer. 1.Reindeer are believed to have appeared during the last glaciation, 15,000 years ago. Their roots seem to be in South America. 5 million years ago, South America and North America got united throu... |
15 December 2007
06:50 GMT |
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Do you know which are the most abundant mammals on the tropical South American forest? Monkeys? Wrong! Sloths...Sloths are solitary and arboreal (tree dwellers) mammals. Today, there are 2 genera of sloths: three toed sloths (Bradypus) and two toed sloths (Choelepus), each one in its own family (thus, not so closely ... |
13 December 2007
11:57 GMT |
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Last year, the South China Tiger, also known as Amoy tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis), a subspecies native of south China, was catalogued as the fourth race of tiger extinct in the wild in just 100 years. The last one was seen in the wild in 1964. In 1994, the last known wild South Chinese tiger was shot by poachers... |
10 December 2007
05:50 GMT |
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The taiga or northern coniferous forest harbors about 50 plants producing berries, most of them edible. These fruits are vividly colored, have a strong aroma and are rich in vitamins and minerals. They also contain fibers that help stabilize the blood's sugar level and lower the cholesterol level. Their flavone ... |
7 December 2007
12:31 GMT |
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Europeans regarded them as part of myths for long, the old Egyptian and Greek texts mentioned the existence of very short people in Africa. Ancient Greeks spoke about "Pugmaeus" ("foot" as a measure unit). But in 1874, a German explorer met the first pygmies ever seen by a European in the current Congo republic. Sti... |
30 November 2007
13:21 GMT |
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It is the "father of all rivers". With 6,800 km (4,250 mi) in length, it overpasses the Nile (6,695 km or 4,184 mi). But the Amazon's debit is 60 times bigger than that of the former: 200,000 cubic meters/second (the largest in the world, delivering 20 % of the freshwater volume penetrating the oceans). While th... |
24 November 2007
04:00 GMT |
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It is considered the roof of Africa. When German missionaries reported in 1848 a snow-covered mountain in equatorial Africa, everybody in Europe laughed. But later expedition confirmed this. Kilimanjaro is located in northeastern Tanzania, close to the border with Kenya, standing at only 3 degrees south of Equator (3... |
21 November 2007
10:36 GMT |
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You may not like flowers, but if you like vanilla, you actually like ... orchids. Vanilla is the only comestible orchid and the vanilla stick is nothing else than the fermented and blackened pod of an orchid, Vanilla planifolia that is to be found in Mexico. (in fact "vanilla" means "little pod" in Spanish). Did you ... |
17 November 2007
04:02 GMT |
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Scientists were taken by surprise when they found out about the existence of a new population of De Brazza's monkeys, a threatened species in eastern Africa, in Kenya, far away from the wet forests of central Africa, good news for those hoping to save the world's primates.A recent report signaled that habit... |
6 November 2007
07:09 GMT |
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These are the New World's native wild boars: the peccaries. And till now, the largest pig-like species have stood hidden from scientists in the southeastern Amazon region of Brazil. It is the largest peccary in the world, about the size of a large dog.The new species, the forest giant peccary (Pecari maximus) wa... |
5 November 2007
03:56 GMT |
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Melting ice has 'provided' us with frozen mammoths and even frozen people, like the famous Oetzi from the Alps, as if they were kept in a fridge. No wonder that melting glaciers in Western Canada, which recently reached a historic minimum, have unveiled 7,000-year-old tree stumps. The prehistoric tree stump... |
1 November 2007
06:00 GMT |
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1. Gibbons are the smallest living apes. They are restricted to the southeastern Asia (Indochina, and three big islands of Indonesia: Borneo, Sumatra and Java). Gibbons split from the line that evolved towards humans over 10 million years ago. Experts say that all living gibbons evolved from one species, 2 million ye... |
22 October 2007
14:06 GMT |
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1. The Orangutan is the only Asian ape, closely related to humans, chimps and gorillas, from which they split more than 8 million years ago. Today they live in the islands of Borneo and Sumatra (southeastern Asia). Till recently, they were believed to represent the same species, but DNA analysis showed there are two ... |
18 October 2007
13:06 GMT |
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If you think vampires exist just in books, movies and the rich imagination of some people, you're wrong. There are real vampires which have bat wings, are nocturnal, feed on blood and kill tens of people every year.But the similarities with Bram Stroker's character Dracula - who served as the 'prototyp... |
16 August 2007
13:06 GMT |
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Today's Greenland is an icy polar desert; just on the southern coast, there is some tundra vegetation, with its giants represented by dwarf birch and willows that do not grow taller than 1-2 ft (0.3-0.6 m). The name "Greenland" was given by the first Viking explorers just to attract colonists to the area. Wood d... |
6 July 2007
04:06 GMT |
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This is the river of the superlatives. Nile is consensually considered the longest river on Earth, with 6,695 km in length, but some say the Amazon has this honor, with 6,800 km in length. Some researchers even state that Amazon is 7,100 km long. The problem is that nobody could tell where Amazon ends, due to its hug... |
3 July 2007
12:10 GMT |
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When first European explorers crossed the jungles of Sumatra in the 19th century, they were amazed to discover flowers as big as a wheel, lying apparently on the ground. The flower with the fleshy juicy petals had a vivid red color, crossed by fine brown-yellow networks. On the upper part of the floral cup the reprod... |
21 June 2007
15:06 GMT |
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When did the trademark of Robin Hood appear?And how did the first woods look like? Scientists have now found complete fossils of the world's oldest forest, during the Devonian era, 385 million years ago. But this forest may have looked like young palm trees as it was made of slender trees about three stories ta... |
19 April 2007
03:11 GMT |
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Rapa Nui or Easter Island, also called by the locals Tepitothenua (the navel of the world) is an almost barren triangular island of 170 square kilometers, believed to be the most isolated inhabited place on Earth, at 3,760 km (2,300 mi) off Chile, to which it belongs, at 27o 08' S and 109o 23' V. It is a vo... |
3 April 2007
12:18 GMT |
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