Latest Decomposition Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The fall leaves look like confetti piling up in your back yard with brilliant reds, golds, and oranges. They can be thought of as natural stores of carbon, as well as a beautiful nuisance that you have to rake up each Autumn. Leaves soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the spring, converting the gas into organic carbon compounds. In the fall, the leaves fall from the trees and decompose in the soil as they are eaten by...
How do grasshoppers who are being frightened by spiders affect our ecosystem? In no small measure, say researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Yale University in the US. A grasshopper that is in fear of an attacker, such as a spider, will enter a situation of stress and will consume a greater quantity of carbohydrate-rich plants – similar to humans under stress who might eat more sweets. This type of reaction will, in turn, cause chemical changes in the grasshopper...
The pregnant ichthyosaur female from Holzmaden (Germany) that perished 182 million years ago puzzled researchers for quite some time: The skeleton of the extinct marine reptile is almost immaculately preserved and the fossilized bones of the mother animal lie largely in their anatomical position. The bones of the ichthyosaur embryos, however, are a different story: For the most part, they lie scattered outside the body of the mother. Such peculiar bone arrangements are repeatedly found in...
In an advance toward the first portable device for detecting human bodies buried in disasters and at crime scenes, scientists today report early results from a project to establish the chemical fingerprint of death. Speaking here at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), they said a profile of the chemicals released from decomposing bodies could also lead to a valuable new addition to the forensic toolkit: An electronic device that could determine the time...
Current models of global climate change predict warmer temperatures will increase the rate that bacteria and other microbes decompose soil organic matter, a scenario that pumps even more heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere. But a new study led by a University of Georgia researcher shows that while the rate of decomposition increases for a brief period in response to warmer temperatures, elevated levels of decomposition don't persist."There is about two and a half times more carbon in the...
BURNSVILLE, Minn., Oct. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Barry & Associates, Inc. today announced a new site that can help with the design of your enterprise architecture. The site provides a free service that helps designers work through the design decomposition process. A feature of the service is the Decomposition Matrix on which you identify the relationships between inputs and outputs for the system being designed. The Decomposition Matrix then generates an optimal decomposition that is shown as...
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa -- Iowa's rich topsoil and climate have nourished some of the nation's most plentiful corn and soybean crops. Tyler O'Brien wants to learn more about their influence on rotting corpses. A biological anthropology professor at the University of Northern Iowa, O'Brien envisions turning some prime Iowa pasture into a body farm, where human bodies - buried, stuffed in car trunks or exposed to the elements - can provide scholars and criminalists with new benchmark data on human...
