Singh, who was invited by the Unites States Implementing Organisation (USIO) through the Ministry of Earth Sciences India (IODP-India) to participate as one of the shipboard scientists in the International Ocean Drilling Programme (IODP-399), Mediterranean Outflow Expedition said: “Many large currents flow beneath the ocean at different depths and together these currents form a global conveyer belt that transfers heat and buffer Earth’s temperature or climate,” said Singh.

According to him, water of Mediterranean Sea is saltier and denser than Atlantic Ocean and therefore it plunges more than 1000 metre down slope, building up mountains of mud at the Strait of Gibraltar, the gateway where the Mediterranean Sea enters Atlantic Ocean that holds a record of climate change and tectonic activity that spans much of the past 5.3 million years. The circulations generated at Strait of Gibraltar passes through Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean and have great record of climate change.

Another key discovery at the expedition was related to oil and natural gas exploration. The team of 35 scientists under expedition’s scientific leaders Prof Dorrik Stow (UK) and Javier Hernandez-Molina (Spain) also researched on the contourites deposits at the Strait of Gibraltar that are deposits of rocks that have been deposited by the ocean current in the ocean bed. “These contourites are highly rich in hydrocarbons and gas hydrates and it is believed they can confirm their use as fuel in future. Scientists onboard the highly advanced JOIDES Resolution to drill the 8,000 metre of holes into the deep sea floor at seven different sites in the Gulf of Cadiz and on the west Portuguese continental margin. While working at the sea floor, we also witnessed the leakage of some gas hydrates,” informed Singh.

Singh is the second geologists from India who has been a part of a sea drilling project. Prof M S Srinivasan of BHU was the first scientist to be a part of Deep Sea Drilling Project in early 80s. In the expedition scheduled from November 18, 2011 to January 17, Singh along with eminent scientists from 13 countries (including the US, France, Germany, Japan, UK, Australia, China) spent two months at Atlantic Ocean and carried out research on global climate change and explored marine energy resources. By Swati Chandra, The Times of India

Normal, we discover, is not a constant. It changes with where you live and how long you have lived. My formative years in England brought February walks alongside frost-crusted wheat fields. I searched for puddles that were frozen, so I could smash them with my boot as if they were panes of glass. Rarely were they frozen solid. Usually, the “glass” was eggshell thin, unhappily.

Winters were dark, cold and foggy, but they weren’t frigid. Washington was frigid. Washington was a place where the air turned dry and bitingly cold, and the rhododendron leaves wilted so badly that you had to look away.

And there were moments in a Washington winter when it was cold but beautiful, like looking across a snow-encrusted lawn to see a stand of redtwig dogwood, a shrub whose stems would glow scarlet right after the leaves fell in November. You could stand this beauty until the feeling left your fingers and your ears began to hurt, and then you sought shelter.

Those winters seem a thing of the past. Today, Groundhog Day, we are supposed to find out if a woodchuck (not my favorite rodent) will see its shadow and determine whether winter will last for another six weeks. This year, the question is not so much when winter will end, but when it will start.

I have friends who grow a daffodil that doesn’t need much coaxing, and it will flower in mid-February in a conventional winter. I don’t grow Rijnveld’s Early Sensation because I don’t find yellow trumpet daffodils to be sensational. Moreover, I really don’t want to see a daffodil outside a greenhouse until early March. This “winter” Rijnveld showed his face around Christmas. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Many winter-flowering plants, of which there are a fair number, are primed to bloom sporadically during periods of mildness. This on-and-off flowering can last weeks, as with the autumn-flowering cherry, which folks mistake for the Tidal Basin Yoshino, and the winter jasmine, which folks mistake for forsythia. By the end of January, where I live, the autumn-flowering cherry was in full sail and the mounds of jasmine half done.

There are two basic kinds of snowdrop, the giant snowdrop and the smaller, common species. Both have been in flower for weeks, along with the ground-hugging winter aconite, which resembles a stout buttercup ruffed like Queen Elizabeth (the first). It usually appears in late winter with the snowdrops and before the earliest crocus.

Witch hazels and fragrant wintersweets take their chances, but this year the tentative unfurling of petals is anything but halting. Many varieties are already winding down. At Green Spring Gardens in Northern Virginia, known for its witch hazel collection, a mature and striking variety named Jelena is still splendid, though the coppery flowers have been dulled not with freezing but with age.

A stroll the other day through the botanical park revealed other oddities: a winter heath (Kramer’s Red) smothered in magenta pink blossoms, a pachysandra wanting hard to flower, which it usually achieves in late February, and, most astonishing, a flowering quince in mid-blossom. It’s a white variety (Jet Trail) known for its earliness, but still . . .

I counted two honeybees out supping nectar and a load of gnats whose dance was backlit by the sinking sun. Can mosquitoes be far behind?

The lovely hellebore called lenten rose has already begun to bloom, hidden under the canopy of last year’s leaves. Its cousin, the stinking hellebore, is not as demure — its new growth for the season is a conspicuous lime green confection of stem, leaf and flower. Again, it is doing its thing weeks before expected. Hard to establish, this perennial loves free-draining soil and, where happy, will seed to form great drifts. This has happened at various places at Green Spring, but particularly beneath a great old walnut tree. The bell-like blooms are rimmed with a red line, and they are musky in fragrance, giving the plant its common name.

Typically, all these cold-season bloomers appear as amusing distractions in a winter landscape. What is a winter landscape? It’s a place where nature’s heartbeat slows to a torpor, where the grass is brown, the shrubs naked and slowly budding, and the leaves that do linger have flagged and lost their radiance. This winter, that hibernation has been spotty at best. We’re not in spring, but a sort of limbo where the greenery has a sap-infused glow about it.

Most of my fellow gardeners rejoice at the great displays of snowdrops, for example, but there is an underlying anxiety that this isn’t right. For us, or our plants. The end of winter may have a sting in its tail made all the more potent by the warmth. Watch out, you magnolia lovers and apple growers. Until that happens, if it happens, I think I’ll sow some peas. Spring may be fleeting. By Adrian Higgins, The Washington Post

Stone breakwaters are being enlarged on the low-lying island state’s man-made east coast and their heights raised. Barges carrying imported sand top up the beach, which is regularly breached by high tides.

Singapore, the world’s second most densely populated country after Monaco, covers 715 square km (276 sq miles). It has already reclaimed large areas to expand its economy and population — boosting its land area by more than 20 percent since 1960.

But the new land is now the frontline in a long-term battle against the sea.

Every square metre is precious in Singapore.

One of the world’s wealthiest nations in per-capita terms, it is also among the most vulnerable to climate change that is heating up the planet, changing weather patterns and causing seas to rise as the oceans warm and glaciers and icecaps melt.

Late last year, the government decided the height of all new reclamations must be 2.25 metres (7.5 feet) above the highest recorded tide level — a rise of a metre over the previous mandated minimum height.

The additional buffer was costly but necessary, Environment Minister Vivian Balakrishnan told Reuters in a recent interview.

“You are buying insurance for the future,” he said during a visit to a large flood control barrier that separates the sea from a reservoir in the central business area.

The decision underscores the government’s renowned long-term planning and the dilemma the country faces in fighting climate change while still trying to grow. It also highlights the problem facing other low-lying island states and coastal cities and the need to prepare.

A major climate change review for the Chinese government last week said China’s efforts to protect vulnerable coastal areas with embankments were inadequate. It said in the 30 years up to 2009, the sea level off Shanghai rose 11.5 centimeters (4.5 inches); in the next 30 years, it will probably rise another 10 to 15 centimeters.

POCKET POWERHOUSE

Since it was created by the British as a trading port in the early 19th century, Singapore has turned to the sea to expand and has become one of the world’s fastest-growing countries in terms of new land area. More land is being regularly reclaimed.

In this pocket powerhouse, there is much to protect. Singapore’s recipe for success is to be a city of superlatives to keep ahead of competitors. It is a major Asian centre for finance, shipping, trading, manufacturing, even gambling, with giant casinos as glitzy as those in Las Vegas or Macau.

Much of the city centre is on reclaimed land, including an expanding financial district, a new terminal for ocean liners and a $3.2 billion underground expressway, part of which runs under the sea.

The industrial west has one of Asia’s largest petrochemical complexes, much of it on reclaimed islands.

The wealth generated from these sectors has created a $255 billion economy. Per-capita GDP stands on a par with the United States at nearly $50,000, though opposition politicians complain about growing wealth gaps within the island’s society.

The U.N. climate panel says sea levels could rise between 18 and 59 centimetres (7 to 24 inches) this century and more if parts of Antarctica and Greenland melt faster. Some scientists say the rise is more likely to be in a range of 1 to 2 metres.

Singapore could cope with a rise of 50 cm to 1 m, coastal scientist Teh Tiong Sa told Reuters during a tour of the East Coast Park, the city’s main recreation area.

“But a rise of two metres would turn Singapore into an island fortress,” said Teh, a retired teacher from Singapore’s National Institute for Education. That would mean constructing more and higher walls to protect against the sea.

Indeed, between 70 and 80 percent of Singapore already has some form of coastal protection, the government says.

The dilemma Singapore faces is mirrored by other coastal cities, such as Mumbai, Hong Kong, Bangkok and New York, though not all have Singapore’s financial muscle.

The threat underscores the limits on Singapore’s physical growth in terms of further reclamation, costs and managing long-term growth of its population, which has risen from 3 million in 1990 to nearly 5.2 million in 2011.

Topping up reclamation levels “does not fundamentally change the way we approach reclamation — while we reclaim to meet our development needs, we are cognisant that there is a physical limit to how much more land we can reclaim,” a spokesman for the National Climate Change Secretariat told Reuters.

To make more efficient use of existing land, a government agency floated the idea this month of building a science city 30 stories underground.

WINDS OF CHANGE

Climate change presents a host of other challenges.

More intense rainfall has caused embarrassing floods in the premier Orchard Road shopping area.

And the government says average daily temperature in tropical Singapore could increase by 2.7 to 4.2 degrees Celsius (4.9 to 7.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from the current average of 26.8 deg C (80.2 F) by 2100, which could raise energy use for cooling.

Here lies another dilemma. The country is already one of the most energy intensive in Asia to power its industries and fiercely airconditioned malls and glass office towers — a paradox in a country at such risk from climate change.

The government has focused on energy efficiency, such as strict building codes and appliance labelling to curb the growth of planet-warming carbon emissions and has steadily switched its power stations to burn gas instead of fuel oil.

It has also invested heavily in slick subway lines and promoted investment and research in the clean-tech sector.

But electricity demand is still set to grow. Consumption doubled between 1995 and 2010, government figures show, and long-term reliance on fossil fuels for energy is unlikely to change, given limited space for green energy such as solar.

Balakrishnan said the government is keen to do its part in any global fight against climate change and that pushing for greater energy efficiency made sense anyway in a country with virtually no natural resources.

But there was a limit to how fast it would move, opening the way for criticism from some countries that Singapore was hiding behind its developing country status under the United Nations, which obliges it to take only voluntary steps to curb emissions.

“What we want is a level playing field and unilateral moves are not feasible, not possible, for a small, tiny island state that actually is not going to make a real difference at a global level to greenhouse gases,” Balakrishnan said.

Singapore’s emissions, though, are forecast to keep growing, having roughly doubled since 1990. The government is looking at putting a price on carbon emissions and perhaps setting up an emissions trading market.

“We’re already half way there in the sense we are already pricing everything according to the market,” said Tilak Doshi, head of energy economics at the Energy Studies Institute in Singapore.

He pointed to Singapore being the world’s largest bunkering port.

“Bunkering is huge in terms of carbon emissions and Singapore can play a key role in how to handle global shipping emissions,” he said. “How to handle bunker fuels — do we tax it, do we cap-and-trade it, do we get bunkering companies to start trading emissions certificates?”

The government has a number of levers to adjust energy policies over time. Against rising sea levels, it is a campaign in progress to tame the tides.

In some cases, it might be better to let the sea reclaim the land in a managed retreat, said Teh, the coastal scientist.

“It’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Some areas you keep, others you let go.” For land-limited Singapore, that could prove a tough decision to make. By David Fogarty, moneycontrol.com

Since 1990, at least 87 species of marine mammals — including dolphins, porpoises and manatees — have been served up in 114 countries. They are the victims of hunting and even commercial fishing operations, where they are sometimes caught accidentally, the researchers said.

The fishing of larger marine mammals, like humpback whales, is strictly regulated and monitored; but the extent to which these smaller warm-blooded marine species, including dolphins and seals, are caught, killed and eaten has been largely unstudied and unmonitored.

“International regulatory bodies exist to gauge the status of whale populations and regulate the hunting of these giants,” study researcher Martin Robards, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. “These species, however, represent only a fraction of the world’s diversity of marine mammals, many of which are being accidentally netted, trapped, and — in some instances — directly hunted without any means of tracking as to whether these off-takes are sustainable.”

Porpoise and narwhal on the menu

To get a clearer picture of the problem, the Wildlife Conservation Society and Okapi Wildlife Associates examined records on small fisheries focused on small whales (like pilot whales), dolphins and porpoises from 1975 and records of global marine mammal catches between 1966 and 1975.

From there, the researchers consulted about 900 other sources, including reports and discussions with numerous researchers and environmental managers; the exhaustive investigation took three years to complete.

They found that since 1990, people in at least 114 countries have consumed one or more of at least 87 marine mammal species. The list includes species people might not know by name or sight, such as the pygmy beaked whale, South Asian river dolphin, narwhal, Chilean dolphin, long-finned pilot whale and Burmeister’s porpoise. The list also includes well-known species, such as bottlenose dolphins, seals, sea lions (including the California sea lion), polar bears and three species of manatees. [ Gallery: Polar Bears Swimming in the Arctic ]

Some of these species, like the manatee’s close relative the dugong, are considered a delicacy in some parts of the world, making them targets of human consumption.

Wild eats

Since the 1970s, humans’ taste for these warm-blooded aquatic animals has apparently been on the rise, the researchers found, especially in coastal areas and estuaries (where rivers meet oceans). This could be due, in part, to changes in fishing techniques in those areas, where these marine mammals are caught as “bycatch” in nets meant for other fish.

In areas such as the Congo, Gabon and Madagascar, these marine mammals serve as supplementary sources of dietary protein, similar to the animals in the forests that are taken by hunters and locals as bushmeat. As the world’s population continues to increase, so does its food needs. The Wildlife Conservation Society is working with fishermen in these areas to reduce the need to catch wild marine mammals, and instead hunt sustainable fish.

The researchers say that increased awareness of the problem and increased monitoring are needed to prevent the destruction of marine life.

“There is a need for improved monitoring of species such as Atlantic and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins,” Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program, said in a statement. “In more remote areas and a number of countries, a greater immediate need is to understand the motivations behind the consumption of marine mammals and use these insights to develop solutions to protect these iconic species.” By Jennifer Welsh, MSNBC

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe their findings could help the military fly unmanned drones as fast as possible without crashing.

They looked at birds such as the daredevil northern goshawk and developed mathematical models based on the way the animals travel through the air.

MIT professor and study author Emilio Frazzoli said: “If birds flew at speeds purely based on what they can immediately see, they wouldn’t go very fast.”

Instead, he explained, they roughly calculate the density of the environment they are flying through and set themselves a top speed based on the likelihood of finding a gap between the trees or buildings, the Daily Mail reports.

Above that top speed, he went on, they are “sure to crash”. But if they stay below it, they could theoretically remain in flight forever.

Frazzoli, who is currently testing his theory on pigeons, added: “There is no magic number for the critical speed. In fact, the critical speed depends on some parameters describing tree density and size, and the bird’s manoeuvrability and size.

“In other words, if the forest is too dense, the trees are too thick, the bird is too large or flying too fast, it will eventually collide with a tree,” he added.

He said that mathematical calculations drawn from the way birds fly could eventually be used by scientists to increase the speed unmanned drones can safely fly at. Zeenews

Until now, rodents have been the primary creatures used to make chimeras, a lab animal produced by combining two or more fertilised eggs or early embryos together.

Scientists have long been able to create “knock-out” mice with certain genes deleted in order to study a host of ailments and remedies, including obesity, heart disease, anxiety, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.

Attempts to do the same with more complicated primates have failed in the past, but scientists in the western state of Oregon succeeded by altering the method used to make mice.

The breakthrough came when they mixed cells together from very early stage rhesus monkey embryos, in a state known as totipotent, when they are able to give rise to a whole animal as well as the placenta and other life-sustaining tissues.

“Knock-out” mice are typically made by introducing embryonic stem cells that have been cultured in a lab dish into a mouse embryo, but that method failed in monkeys.

Primate embryos do not allow cultured embryonic stem cells to become integrated, as mice do.

Combining primate cells apparently requires more potent, early stage cells from a living embryo, said lead researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health and Science University.

The experiment produced three healthy male rhesus monkeys they named Roku, Hex and Chimero, with gene traits from all of the separate embryos used to meld them.

“The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs,” said Mitalipov. “The possibilities for science are enormous.”

The research is published online ahead of the release of the January 20 issue of the journal Cell.

Scientists use rhesus monkeys to study HIV/AIDS drugs, research vaccines for rabies, smallpox and polio, and to study potential uses for embryonic stem cells. They have also been launched into space on test missions by the US and Russia.

“We cannot model everything in the mouse,” Mitalipov said. “If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can’t do.” The Australian

A team from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, which went to Iceland to study a set of geothermally-heated streams, came up with these findings.

The streams provided them with a unique environment to isolate the effects of temperature from other confounding variables found in nature, the journal Global Change Biology reports.

Explained Queen Mary’s Daniel Perkins who led the study: “The streams in Iceland are all very similar, in terms of their physical and chemical environment, but maintain very different temperatures to each other all year round.

“This enabled us to explore how temperature, both past and present, affects the rate at which respiration responds to temperature in ecosystems,” he said in a statement.

Perkins said when the team exposed the organisms found in streams to a range of temperatures, “the rate at which carbon was respired increased with temperature as expected, but surprisingly the rate of increase was consistent across streams”.

Said co-author Gabriel Yvon-Durocher, also from Queen Mary: “Our findings demonstrate that the intrinsic temperature sensitivity of respiration is the same across a diverse range of organisms, adapted to markedly different temperatures.

“This result is important because it will help us build more accurate models to predict how rates of carbon dioxide emission from ecosystem will respond to the temperature increases forecast in the coming decades.” Zeenews

Those areas are in “hot spots” highly vulnerable to massive environmental changes this century due to global warming, the study states.

Much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba is predicted to see major shifts northward of plant and animal species.

“By about 2100, the climate change projections that we have today would suggest that there would be pressure on that grassland so prevalent in [the Canadian Prairies] to move further northward — and at the expense of the forest moving further northward as well,” said NASA climate scientist Duane Walliser, who spoke with CBC News from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Walliser said that all across the globe, whole ecological zones such as deserts and tundra will be on the move because of “unprecedented” warming at a pace faster than at any time in 10,000 years.

But Western Canada will be among the areas hardest hit.

A map of the globe on the NASA study shows much the Prairies in bright red “hot spots” of ecological stress, where 100 per cent of the landscape is predicted to see major changes in plant species.

Researchers said the areas are vulnerable because they have wide transition zones where grasslands meet boreal regions.

“So anywhere in Canada where you are currently at what’s called an ‘ecotone,’ or the transition zone between the prairie plant communities and the boreal forest plant communities, that’s where the greatest change will be observed,” said NASA collaborator, Jon Bergengren, a global ecologist and earth systems scientist.

The Saskatchewan Research Council is reaching similar conclusions.

One of its scientists, Jeff Thorpe, published a report last May suggesting the Prairies will see fewer trees, a loss in wetlands, and an invasion of species dependent on open grassland.

“Some of the grasslands species that we don’t have yet, they’re down in the United States, we expect them to shift northward into Canada,” said Thorpe from Saskatoon Wednesday.

Some wildlife will not survive

The NASA study says 37 per cent of Earth’s land surface will transform from one major ecosystem zone, or biome, into another, while 49 per cent of land surfaces will see at least some changes in plant species.

Bergengren said some wildlife will not survive these transformations.

“Obviously, it is much easier for plants and animals to migrate or adapt to this level of climatic change over 10,000 years than it is over 100 years,” he said.

The NASA model used a global temperature increase of two to four degrees this century, as predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By Mychaylo Prystupa, CBC News

To address this issue, researchers have been reestablishing and protecting connections on the landscape for many years, from building highway crossings to maintaining swaths of forest. These wildlife corridors are designed to enable the meanderings and migrations of animals. As scientists’ efforts to improve the quality of these connections become increasingly sophisticated and more mathematical, they are finding that solving the problem has much in common with what happens when someone asks an online service to provide driving directions between two points on a map.

For planners, the goal is to preserve or create effective connections for wildlife at low cost, just as online map services aim to route travelers in the most efficient way possible. Designing a landscape to simultaneously serve the needs of multiple animal species is much more difficult because each may prefer a different type of environment. It’s similar to trying to find the single best set of directions between two points for multiple modes of transportation, such as driving, walking, and mountain biking.

“Because they bring several dimensions, these problems are computationally much harder,” said Carla Gomes, a computer scientist from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “If the problem is to connect just two terminals, for one species, then that problem is exactly the same computationally speaking as the problem that Google solves when I ask for the shortest path, for the fastest way to go from Boston to Ithaca, N.Y.”

Michael Schwartz, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont. had been gathering genetic data for more than 10 years and began to find that the methods they were using to analyze certain wildlife management topics were insufficient.

“We got to the point where the math became intractable to us,” said Schwartz.

Schwartz started working with Claire Montgomery, a forest economist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who had been developing methods to address both animal populations and timber management strategies.

“I was beginning to look at problems where uncertainty played a much bigger role than it had in the past in my research,” said Montgomery. “And that kind of created a whole new dimension to the problem that I didn’t even have a clue how to address computationally.”

Multi-Purpose Land Use

Land can be managed with many different outcomes in mind. The land might be used to provide timber or to preserve native species while simultaneously being used for public recreation. Finding the best outcome for many competing interests can be complicated.

One option is providing stable habitat areas for wildlife and connecting them with corridors that enable animals to roam or migrate safely.

These competing interests make compromises inevitable. Analyzing the potential outcomes of different strategies on the inhabitants and resources that rely on a piece of land is complicated, and when the equation also includes the cost of purchasing additional land to provide those wildlife corridor areas, tradeoffs are unavoidable. Setting up a decision-making process with easily understood priorities is also important. Finding the best solution requires computational power and advanced algorithms.

“We felt pretty good about that approach for a single species,” said Schwartz. “The question became, ‘What happens when you look at multiple species?’”

About two years ago, Schwartz and Montgomery started working with Gomes, who is developing a new field she calls “computational sustainability.” It combines aspects of ecology, economics and operations research to intensely analyze data to reveal more comprehensive solutions to difficult problems.

“You want to optimize the quality of the corridors you get for a given budget you have,” said Gomes. “A lot of these problems are really highly computational.”

Identifying the crucial pieces of land that offer the greatest preservation potential for many animal species and not just one is a multi-layered problem that requires intensive analysis. Consider that the best corridor for grizzly bears may not be ideal habitat for wolverines, and the best compromise for those two may not assist birds.

Factoring in the impacts of those corridors on how humans use the land in question makes the problem more complex.

Useful Data

Ecologists can collect massive amounts of data about animal habits, movement patterns and more. But, even while many of them have expertise in some of the issues at hand, bringing together a multidisciplinary team may be required to identify the most important pieces of land to protect.

The data revolution of recent decades has resulted in increased computational power that has appealed to others researching related topics as well.

“We’ve obviously benefited tremendously from the ability to do some of these more complex modeling and mathematical computations that weren’t available to us when it was done by paper and pen,” said Jon Beckmann, a conservation scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s North American program who doesn’t work with the team. “We’ve gone from expert-based opinion modeling to models that are based on actual field data.”

Beckmann trained as a field ecologist and has had training in computational techniques, but feels that the power of analysis is only as powerful as the data used to underlie the models.

“What you do is build teams with biologists or ecologists that have these strengths because you need both components,” said Beckmann. “As we develop these new mathematical capabilities and theories, then it’s a continual process that’s always changing.”

Corridors are complicated and they must be crafted to appeal to animals and in a way that maintains animals’ safe passage. If a corridor is designed in a way different from how animals travel the landscape, then it might not work as intended.

“Animals don’t read signs,” said Cheryl Chetkiewicz, a conservation biologist with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, who also doesn’t work with the team. “It’s about maintaining flow. Flows of animals, flows of energy, flows of plants…Corridors are one conservation tool to maintain these flows and avoid barriers in some areas.”

Researchers can attempt to translate these factors into models and equations for computer analysis. But Chetkiewicz, who has also studied intact landscapes, isn’t convinced that corridors are the best or only solution to the problems faced by animals while they travel. Corridors are a popular management tool, but they don’t necessarily represent the ideal situation from an animal’s point of view.

“Corridors to me are a last ditch effort to reconnect patches that used to be connected,” said Chetkiewicz.

Applying Models to Real Problems

Schwartz said that the models he developed with Montgomery and Gomes are complex and layered, so translating them into a form that land managers can understand and use is critical to protecting contemporary and future landscapes. Schwartz said that without that next step of translating computer model results into the protection of land, animal habitats may collapse to form what he said a colleague calls “a bunch of isolated zoos.”

This makes it important to be able to effectively communicate the science to land managers, who report to the public and must be able to make effective and transparent decisions.

The problem can be simply stated, but the solution may not be obvious. Tracking the effects of choices on numerous variables and finding the best overall outcome really is difficult.

“In the past in most forestry applications we look at a particular landscape and we find a management strategy for that landscape, but it’s specific to that landscape and to the spatial configuration of vegetation and roads and so on and you can’t take it anywhere else,” said Montgomery.

“What we are trying to do is combine what the animals like with the reality of economic constraints and budget constraints,” said Gomes. By Chris Gorski, PhysOrg

That implies there are some 10 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy.

Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.

The findings were released at the 219th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, alongside reports of the smallest “exoplanets” ever discovered.

Gravitational microlensing is a method that uses the gravity of a far-flung star to amplify the light from even more distant stars that have planets.

Astronomers used a number of relatively small telescopes that make up the Microlensing Network for the Detection of Small Terrestrial Exoplanets, or Mindstep, to look for the rare event of one star passing directly in front of another as seen from Earth.

The team witnessed 40 of these microlensing events, and in three instances spotted the effects of planets circling the more distant stars.

While the number of actual events and detected planets was low, the team was able to estimate how many such exoplanets must exist.

Most news of exoplanets in recent years has come from the Kepler telescope, which spots planets by looking for the slight dimming of their host stars’ light as planets pass in front of them.

That method is better at finding large planets close to their host stars.

While a more difficult effect to catch, gravitational microlensing is better at finding planets of all sizes and distances.

It can currently spot a planet as small as Mercury, orbiting at a similar distance to its host star, or as far away as Saturn.

The study, also published in the journal Nature, was a collaboration between researchers from more than 20 international institutes and universities.

“Just the recent 15 years have seen the count of known planets beyond the Solar System rising from none to about 700, but we can expect hundreds of billions to exist in the Milky Way alone,” said co-author Dr Martin Dominik, from the University of St Andrews, UK.

Ever smaller

Complementing the microlensing approach, Kepler measurements hold a number of small-planet surprises as well.

In December, the Kepler team announced the first Earth-sized planet, the smallest yet detected.

At the AAS meeting on Wednesday, the Kepler team announced even smaller planets, all three orbiting a tiny red dwarf star called KOI-961.

The planets are just 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth.

The discovery came from an analysis of Kepler catalogue data released to the public in January 2011.

Among those poring through the data was John Johnson, a California Institute of Technology astronomer, who told the meeting that, as in the case of other red dwarfs, little is known about the size of the KOI-961.

Because of the way Kepler detects exoplanets, star size is crucial to the measurements of planet sizes. But UK amateur astronomer and longtime collaborator with Prof Johnson contacted the team with a clue.

“When he looked at the colours and other properties that we measure for KOI-961, he sent us an email immediately and said, ‘Do you know you guys are looking at a twin of a very famous star called Barnard’s star?’,” Prof Johnson told the meeting.

The team was able to use known data from the well-studied Barnard’s star to make guesses about KOI-961′s properties.

That, Mr Apps told BBC News, was when “we realised that it was even more remarkable than we thought: the star was fainter, the planets were smaller. The whole thing was like a very compact triple planetary system.”

Or, as Prof Johnson told the meeting, “It’s like you took your shrink ray gun and set it to seven times smaller… What we have here is a planetary system that’s shrunk down because the central star is so tiny.” By Jason Palmer, BBC News