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It is amazing the sorts of things that you can recycle these days. It seems like lots of different packaging s now recyclable, even though it is not always easy to find a local facility for recycling them. However, it is great that more and more things are able to be recycled, I even heard recently about X-Ray Film Recycling which is not only another great new recycling facility but can raise money for radiology reading rooms because there are companies which will buy film from places such as orthopedic pacs. It is great that these things are happening and that we should be able to get hold of lots more recycled products soon, which is fantastic.

It means that we will not be producing so much waste and we will not have so many problems with thinking about how to get rid of our rubbish. Trying to find room for landfill will get harder and harder if we keep consuming more and throwing away a lot more rubbish and so by recycling it we can avoid this problem. It means that as our children grow up, they will not have the problem of being swamped with rubbish and hopefully they will be able to find even better ways of reusing and recycling than we have.

A noted ornithologist has suggested creation of another bird sanctuary inside the vast Chilika lake to give legal protection to the migratory birds visiting the biggest wetland in the country for waterfowl habitats.

“There should be another bird sanctuary comprising areas of Bhubaneswar, Mangalajodi and Balipatapur, in the northern side of the lake, as more migratory birds are now seen taking shelter in these areas,” ornithologist U N Dev, who has been studying the birds in Chilika for the last three decades, said.

Orissa has declared 15.53 Sq km Nalabana island as a bird sanctuary under the provisions of Wildlife (protection) act, 1972 to give protection to the winged guests.

“Besides Nalabana, the migratory birds are seen flocking the northern side of the Chilika for the last several years and their number has also been increasing,” Dev said, adding that the congregation of birds in the northern side of the lake is the second highest after the Nalabana sanctuary.

“There is no restriction on creating another bird sanctuary in Chilika,” Dev said, citing examples of a number of sanctuaries in the Andaman islands and Sundarbans.

As per official data, this year as many as 1.14 lakh birds of different species have taken shelter in Mangalajodi area, while 75,000 avians have come in Balipatapur area.

Last year around 1.03 lakh birds had congregated in Bhusandapur area. As many as 5,12,501 birds of various species visited Nalabana area, while number of birds to the lake was 8,90,813.

The congregation of birds in the northern side of the lake is the second highest after the Nalabana sanctuary.

“There is no restriction on creating another bird sanctuary in the Chilika,” Dev said citing the examples of a number of sanctuaries in the Andaman islands and Sundarbans.

Dev has also underscored the need for better management of Nala, a type of grass inside the Nalabana, to attract birds belonging to the crane species.

“The highest number of cranes are attracted towards the Nalabana because of the Nala and their proper management should be undertaken to attract many more species,” he said.

The earth’s climate has been significantly affected by the planet’s magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.

“Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth’s magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics,” one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal.

He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a reconstruction of the prehistoric magnetic field 5,000 years ago based on data drawn from stalagmites and stalactites found in China and Oman.

The results of the study, which has also been published in US scientific journal Geology, lend support to a controversial theory published a decade ago by Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, who claimed the climate was highly influenced by galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles penetrating the earth’s atmosphere.

Svensmark’s theory, which pitted him against today’s mainstream theorists who claim carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for global warming, involved a link between the earth’s magnetic field and climate, since that field helps regulate the number of GCR particles that reach the earth’s atmosphere.

“The only way we can explain the (geomagnetic-climate) connection is through the exact same physical mechanisms that were present in Henrik Svensmark’s theory,” Knudsen said.

“If changes in the magnetic field, which occur independently of the earth’s climate, can be linked to changes in precipitation, then it can only be explained through the magnetic field’s blocking of the cosmetic rays,” he said.

The two scientists acknowledged that CO2 plays an important role in the changing climate, “but the climate is an incredibly complex system, and it is unlikely we have a full overview over which factors play a part and how important each is in a given circumstance,” Riisager told Videnskab.

The United States and Vietnam will jointly study the impact of climate change on the Mekong Delta and other low-lying river regions worldwide, officials said on Monday.

Scientists from both countries will work at a new Delta Research and Global Observation Network (DRAGON) institute, the first of several that are due to be set up worldwide, at southern Vietnam’s Can Tho University.

Vietnam is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, said Tran Thuc, head of the Vietnam Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment.

“If the sea level rises by about one metre (three feet), the whole Mekong Delta will be submerged.”

The densely-populated Mekong Delta, a region of canals and waterways south of Ho Chi Minh City, is Vietnam’s main rice growing region and produces more than half the country’s fish and seafood exports.

The US-led project hopes to include data in future from 10 countries to gather information on deltas including those of the Nile, Yangtze and Volga rivers, said Gregory Smith, head of the National Wetlands Research Center of the US Interior Department.

The aim was to gather “large-scale data sets” to help in modelling the impact of rising sea levels and worsening cyclonic storms on river deltas, and on the man-made structures and communities in them, he said.

For the US side, the chief aim is to make the Mississippi Delta resilient to climate change, following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and nearby areas in 2005, Smith said.

He said the International Panel on Climate Change had this year “identified mega-deltas around the world that are at risk from cyclonic storms and would result in massive human displacement.”

“The Mekong is the extreme,” he said. “The Mississippi has a moderate amount of vulnerability.”

In an effort to increase the population of endangered Black bucks, a research institute in Hyderabad has adopted a method of artificial insemination as a way to make the animals produce more live births.

Biology (CCMB) has succeeded in making two Black bucks conceive and deliver two fawns recently.

The two live births were delivered by the animals on September 14 and October five this year. Two of the inseminated females delivered after 177 days of pregnancy, CCMB spokesperson J P Sastry said.

A Black buck had conceived last year after the LaCONES applied the same technique on it, he said.

“In artificial insemination, we undertake ultrasonography to monitor the womb of the Black buck through sound waves. It shows whether the animal has conceived or not,” he said.

The animal has become an endangered species and is listed in Scheduled-1 of the Indian Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 due to over-hunting of the animal for meat and trade.

The artificial insemination technology was necessitated as a production strategy for conservation measure, he said.

The method, known as assisted reproductive technology, would significantly contribute to the maintenance of genetic diversity and conservation of endangered animals.

A tree that has been called a “living fossil” is helping researchers understand how tropical forests responded to past climate change and how they may react to future global warming.

Symphonia globulifera is a tropical tree with a history going back 45 million years in Africa, said Christopher Dick, assistant professor of evolutionary biology, Michigan University.

About 15 to 18 million years ago, deposits of fossil pollen suggest, Symphonia suddenly appeared in South America and then in Central America.

Unlike kapok, a tropical tree with a similar distribution that Dick also has studied, Symphonia isn’t well-suited for travelling across the ocean - its seeds dry out easily and can’t tolerate saltwater, said a release of Michigan University.

So how did Symphonia reach the neotropics? Most likely the seeds hitched rides from Africa on rafts of vegetation, as monkeys did, Dick said in a new paper of which he is a co-author. The paper will appear in the November issue of the journal Evolution.

Even whole trunks, which can send out shoots when they reach a suitable resting place, may have made the journey. Because central and south America had no land connection at the time, Symphonia must have colonised each location separately.

Once Symphonia reached its new home, it spread throughout the neotropical rain forests. By measuring genetic diversity between existing populations, Dick and co-worker Myriam Heuertz of the Université Libre de Bruxelles were able to reconstruct environmental histories of the areas Symphonia colonised.

“For central America, we see a pattern in Symphonia that also has been found in a number of other species, with highly genetically differentiated populations across the landscape,” Dick said.

“We think the pattern is the result of the distinctive forest history of Mesoamerica, which was relatively dry during the glacial period 10,000 years ago. In many places the forests were confined to hilltops or the wettest lowland regions. What we’re seeing in the patterns of genetic diversity is a signature of that forest history.”

Fishing nets often trap so many dolphins around the world that their numbers are falling below levels where they can maintain their populations, as shown most recently by a study in New Zealand. The number of Hector’s Dolphins caught in commercial nets is 10 times above sustainable levels, according to a new analysis by Otago University.

Hector’s dolphins are of particular significance, as they are only found in New Zealand. The main threat to the species is entanglement in fishing gear, in particular gillnets.

National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) New Zealand estimates that 110-150 Hector’s dolphins have been killed each year during 2000-2006.

Hector’s dolphin populations have been seriously depleted as a result of fishing, to less than a third of original population size, with the North Island population worst affected at less than 10 percent of its original size.

Liz Slooten and Steve Dawson, associate professors at Otago, used the Potential Biological Removal (PBR) method, developed by the US National Marine Fisheries Service, to determine the level of human impact on marine mammal populations.

If the recent level of bycatch were to continue, said Slooten, Hector’s dolphins are expected to decline to around 5,000 individuals over the next 50 years, according to an Otago University press release.

The results of this analysis are consistent with population viability analyses carried out by scientists, the fishing industry and the University of Otago.

Society for Marine Mammalogy, Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission and IUCN have pointed out that there is ample evidence on which to base effective protection measures for Hector’s dolphin.

Slooten recommended that dolphins be protected from mortality caused by fisheries by changing to more selective, sustainable fishing methods.

“This would have benefits not only for Hector’s dolphin conservation but also for other dolphin species and seabirds caught in these fisheries, and in the long term for the fishing industry itself,” she said.

The first case of madcow disease in Italy in two years has been uncovered at a research laboratory in the northern city of Turin, a news agency said on Friday.

The positive sample came from a 13-year-old cow belonging to a herd from Lombardy in the Milan region, the ANSA news agency reported.

The laboratory, which specialises in bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, said the discovery brings to 142 the total number of cows that have now tested positive in Italy.

The big blue ocean is getting noisier, thanks to carbon emissions that have made the oceans more acidic.

Researchers have known for some time that acidity can influence the distance traveled by sound in seawater. In the 1970s, acoustic measurements showed that the reach of low-frequency sounds varies between oceans.

A whale’s call, for example, travels further in the north Pacific than in the north Atlantic, due to differences in pH.

Exactly how the process works is unclear, especially at frequencies below 1 kilohertz, which include whale calls, crashing waves and whirring ship engines.

“At these frequencies the exact molecular mechanism is still a bit fuzzy,” said Peter Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Some suggest that “ion pairs” of carbonate, bicarbonate, boric acid and borate are naturally “tuned” to absorb sound wave energy of 1 kHz and below.

The acidity of the water affects the balance between these chemicals.

Oceans are becoming more acidic because of rising levels of CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, which dissolves in seawater to form carbonic acid.

According to a report in New Scientist, Brewer and his colleagues wanted to find out if these changes could be enough to affect sound transport.

They analyzed a database of ocean acidity during the 20th century, which showed that, on average, ocean pH levels dropped by 0.12.

Using previous experimental data and field observations of how pH affects sound, they calculated how much this drop would affect the absorption of sound waves at 0.44 kHz - the note “A” used to tune an orchestra.

They found that by the early 1990s, sound was being absorbed 15 percent less than in the late 19th century.

Some studies predict ocean pH could drop by an average of 0.3 before the end of this century.

The team calculates that this would cause a 40 percent decrease in the absorption of sounds below 1 kHz.

“The ocean will have higher levels of ambient noise, marine mammals will communicate at greater range, and military or industrial sounds will travel further,” said Brewer.

According to Tim Leighton of the University of Southampton, UK, the changes so far are relatively small, so the effect may be significant only in deep, quiet waters.

“Whether or not the differences will affect animal communication or military operations will require further study,” said Brewer.

Australia’s iconic koala may be heading towards extinction, unless there are changes in how populations are managed.

“Previously hunted to near extinction in the 1920s, the species continues to face ongoing threats to its survival today,” Zoologist and author Stephen Jackson told a magazine.

“The loss of habitat and urban development, the increase of disease, the potential harm of climate change and attacks from other animals all impact the survival of the koala,” he added.

According to Jackson, Port Stephens, north of Newcastle, was home to one of NSW’s (New South Wales) most important koala populations, but it was also facing a decline in the populations of the animal.

Debate rages over how to manage the endangered animals.

“There is differing opinion on the actual population numbers and whether the species should be considered vulnerable, and whether they face extinction at the national level,” Dr Jackson said.