Amazon River exhales virtually all carbon taken up by rain forest

By Hannah Hickey – Until recently people believed much of the rain forest’s carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended up deep in the ocean.

The finding has implications for global carbon models, and for the ecology of the Amazon and the world’s other rivers.

“People thought this was one of the components that just got dumped into the ocean,” said first author Nick Ward, a University of Washington doctoral student in oceanography. “We’ve found that terrestrial carbon is respired and basically turned into carbon dioxide as it travels down the river.” more> http://tinyurl.com/p66frtk

Views from the Solar System (129)

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Expedition 35 Landing

NASA – The Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), NASA Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn and Russian Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Tuesday, May 14, 2013. Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko returned from five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 34 and 35 crews.

Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

Views from the Solar System (128)

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Sunrise Over the South Pacific Ocean
NASA – The sun is about to come up over the South Pacific Ocean in this colorful scene photographed by one of the Expedition 35 crew members aboard the Earth-orbiting International Space Station between 4 and 5 a.m. local time, May 5, 2013.

The space station was at a point above Earth located at 27.4 degrees south latitude and 110.1 degrees west longitude, a few hundred miles east of Easter Island.

Space Launch System (12)

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SPACE WATCH

Orion Crew Module at Kennedy Space Center

NASA – Astronaut Don Pettit watches as a technician works on the Orion crew module inside the Operations and Checkout Building high bay at Kennedy Space Center on March 21, 2013.

The last of eight reaction control system (RCS) pods for the first flight test of Orion has arrived at Kennedy Space Center‘s Operations and Checkout Building from the manufacturer, Aerojet, in Redmond, Wash. The pods will provide the critical maneuvers necessary for Orion’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere during Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), scheduled to launch in 2014.

Orion is the exploration spacecraft designed to carry humans farther into space than ever before. The spacecraft will provide emergency abort capability, sustain crews during space travel and provide safe re-entry from deep-space return velocities.

› Read more about Orion

Image Credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis

Europe’s fight to save its bees

By Richard Schiffman – Last Monday (Apr 29), the European Union banned the most commonly used pesticide group in the world, the neonicotinoids – neonics for short. The ban is set for two years and may be extended.

The EU members took this radical step because their bees are dying – and neonics have been implicated as one contributing cause. The agro-chemical industry warned that the ban will cause huge losses to agriculture, and encouraged farmers to use even more-dangerous insect poisons, which were in vogue before the neonics were introduced in the 1990s.

Europe is invoking the precautionary principle better safe than sorry. Will the United States – which has an even higher economic stake in the health of its pollinators – follow Europe’s lead? more> http://tinyurl.com/c3ka32d