Category: Environment

MANILA, September 29, 2011 (AFP) – The waters around India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are home to the world’s most endangered sea turtles, according to a study released Thursday aimed at setting a blueprint for global conservation. While it was well known that almost all sea turtle species face extinction, the study by 30 scientists […]

MEXICO CITY, September 27, 2011 (AFP) – Footprints from early humans that are between 4,500 and 25,000 years old have been discovered in a remote area of northern Mexico, researchers said Monday. The five footprints set in stone “are among the few impressions of the first inhabitants in the American continent found in Mexico,” the […]

WASHINGTON, September 21, 2011 (AFP) – What goes up must come down. But where? That’s the big question when it comes to a 20-year-old NASA satellite the size of a tour bus which is careening toward Earth and set to crash-land later this week. The US Department of Defense and NASA are tracking the six-ton […]

September 16, 2011 (AFP) – An international animal rights group warned Sri Lanka Friday against giving the Philippines a baby elephant, saying the creature would face a “lifetime of confinement, boredom and abuse”. The Asian unit of US-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) wrote to Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister D. M. Jayaratne […]

WASHINGTON, September 10, 2011 (AFP) – NASA on Saturday launched a 0 million pair of washing-machine-sized satellites on a mission to map the Moon’s inner core for the first time. The twin spacecraft took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a three-month journey to the Moon at 9:08 am (1308 GMT) […]

PARIS, September 7, 2011 (AFP) – Were it not for meteorites striking Earth some four billion years ago, humans would never have laid eyes on the gold that has raised and ruined civilisations, according to a study published Thursday. Two hundred million years earlier, during the violent throes of planetary formation, Earth was a mass […]

Sept 07, 2011 (LBO) – Researchers from Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom are devising ways to save a rare primate that is threatened with extinction from habitat loss, including a species that was ˜rediscovered’ two years ago. The University of Colombo, Open University of Sri Lanka and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is […]

PARIS, September 4, 2011 (AFP) – It is the kind of question that keeps biologists up at night: from an evolutionary standpoint, is the innermost digit of a bird’s three-pronged wing more like a thumb or an index finger? A study published online Sunday by Nature says it’s a bit of both. The stemcells in […]

KUALA LUMPUR, September 3, 2011 (AFP) – Malaysia has seized more than 1,000 African elephant tusks in two separate shipments in the past two months, reports said Saturday. The wildlife watchdog says that the illegal ivory trade has been rising globally since 2004 largely due to increasing demand in China, where ivory is often ground […]

Sep 02, 2011 (LBO) – Sri Lanka’s authorities say nearly 6,000 elephants had been found in an island wide census, which was slammed by conservationists as a cover for rulers to identify tusked elephants for capture and domestication. “Out of the total wild elephant population 1107 are calves and juveniles,” minister of agrarian services and […]

PARIS, August 16, 2011 (AFP) – A new species of eel found in the gloom of an undersea cave is a “living fossil” astonishingly similar to the first eels that swam some 200 million years ago, biologists reported on Wednesday. The discovery was made in March last year by a team led by Masaki Miya […]

MINNERIYA, August 12, 2011 (AFP) – Thousands of workers, soldiers and volunteers fanned out across Sri Lanka on Friday to begin the country’s first national elephant survey despite a boycott by some wildlife groups. Hundreds of conservationists decided not to take part because of fears prompted by comments from a minister that the survey will […]