Credit: Image by Katerina Zapfe The kangaskhan, Australia s only species of endemic Pokemon in Pokemon Go, is commonly poached within its natural habitat by Pokemon trainers for use in fighting contests Researchers used several species distribution modeling algorithms to predict how climate change, on top of the already existing human-induced pressures, would impact the distribution of the kangaskhan in the future In addition to this, they found a way to measure how biased commonly used species distribution models are, and found that some models are so biased that their results weren t influenced by the data at all The researchers compared these results to previously published models for hundreds of species of Australian mammals and found similar biases
Credit: Matthew Henry
The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state s inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout.
A larger power grid has perks, but also has perils that researchers at Northwestern University are hoping to address to expedite integration and improvements to the system.
An obvious challenge in larger grids is that failures can propagate further in the case of Texas, across state lines. Another is that all power generators need to be kept synchronized to a common frequency in order to transmit energy. The U.S. is served by three separate grids: The Eastern interconnection, the Western interconnection and the Texas interconnection, interlinked only by direct-current power lines. Any persisten
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Potassium is a major plant nutrient, and recycling it between plants and soil serves the best interest of both. Banana plant absorbs huge amount of potassium from soil and distributes between the trunk (pseudo-stem) and the fruits. Banana plants give fruits only once, and volume of pseudo-stem generated is five to ten times of fruits. Naturally, banana farming generates a huge quantity of biomasses and leads to severe depletion of soil potassium. This book reports how part of the depleted potassium can be restored to soil.
Banana is a major crop in at least 135 countries world over, and more than 150 million MT banana fruits are produced every year. This much of banana production is associated with 750 to 1500 million MT of bio-waste, and this much bio-waste is equivalent to 2.2213 to 4.4427 billion MT of muriate of potash (MOP). We are reporting to show how to use banana plant pseudo-stem in lieu of MOP to grow five different crops on experimental basis. Undoubtedly, our
Credit: David Griffin
A study reported in the journal
Current Biology on April 1 has both good news and bad news for the future of African elephants. While about 18 million square kilometers of Africa an area bigger than the whole of Russia still has suitable habitat for elephants, the actual range of African elephants has shrunk to just 17%of what it could be due to human pressure and the killing of elephants for ivory. We looked at every square kilometer of the continent, says lead author Jake Wall of the Mara Elephant Project in Kenya. We found that 62% of those 29.2 million square kilometers is suitable habitat.
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IMAGE: Insects and crustaceans in surface waters are among those exposed to increasing total applied pesticide toxicity. view more
Credit: Renja Bereswill
A group of scientists from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, has shown that for plants and insects the applied pesticide toxicity in agriculture has substantially increased between 2004 and 2016. In a paper published in the current issue of
Science, the authors show that this pattern is even relevant in genetically modified (GM) crops that were originally designed to reduce pesticide impacts on the environment. We have taken a large body of pesticide use data from the US and have expressed changes of amounts applied in agriculture over time as changes in total applied pesticide toxicity, says lead author Ralf Schulz, professor for environmental sciences in Landau. This provides a new view on the potential consequences that pesticide use in agriculture has on biodiversity and ecosystems .