Scientists in Chile are investigating the sudden disappearance of a 5-acre glacial lake in the south of the country. One theory is that an earthquake opened up a fissure in the ground, allowing the lake’s water to drain through.
[Read](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6225676.stm “Read the Story”) (BBC)
Scientists investigating a mysterious ailment that killed many of the nation’s honeybees are concentrating on pesticides and a new pathogen as possible culprits, and some beekeepers are already trying to keep their colonies away from pesticide-exposed fields.
After months of study, researchers are finding it difficult to tie the die-off to any single factor.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19233858/ “Read the Story”) (AP via MSNBC)
The populations of nearly two dozen common American birds — the fence-sitting meadowlark, the frenetic Rufous hummingbird and the whippoorwill with its haunting call — are half what they were 40 years ago, a new analysis found.
The northern bobwhite and its familiar wake-up whistle once seemed to be everywhere in the East. Last Christmas, volunteer bird counters could find only three of them and only 18 Eastern meadowlarks in Massachusetts. The northern bobwhite had the biggest drop among common birds. In 1967, there were 31 million of the plump ground-loving bird. Now they number closer to 5.5 million.
Many of the species in decline depend on open grassy habitats that are disappearing because of suburban sprawl. Climate change and invasive species are to blame, too.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19225721/ “Read the Story”) (AP via MSNBC)
Half a century after Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” brought irrigation to the arid grasslands of Zhengxin in a remote corner of northwest China, the government is giving up on its attempt to make a breadbasket out of what has increasingly become a stretch of scrub and sand dunes. In a problem that’s pervasive in much of China, overfarming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland.
Many communities have been emptied altogether, leaving behind crumbling homes and empty courtyards.
The battle against deserts is playing out across much of western China. Desertification has caused as much as $7 billion in annual economic losses, the China Daily reported. Over the past decade, Chinese deserts expanded at a rate of 950 square miles a year. The farm production declines have forced China to draw down its grain stocks, and eventually it will need to buy a massive 30-50 million tons a year on the world market.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19232648/ “Read the Story”) (AP via MSNBC)
A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago.
Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.
[Read](http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/06/13/whaleweapon_arc.html?category=archaeology&guid=20070613094500&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000 “Read the Story”) (AP via the Discovery Channel)
People scream after finding huge frogs in their toilet bowls. Frogs hitch rides in cars, later surprising unsuspecting drivers. Since the mid 1990’s, the frogs have caused two or three blackouts per week during the spring and fall.
It’s all real, and, according to the University of Florida, the invasive Cuban tree frog is responsible for the chaos. The species has colonized over half of Florida and is now moving in on the rest of the state. The 6-inch-long frogs, which dwarf native tiny tree frogs, have also been found in Georgia, South Carolina, California, Hawaii and Canada.
[Read](http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/06/14/giantfrogs_ani.html?category=animals&guid=20070614111500&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000 “Read the Story”) (Discovery Channel)
It could be ivory concealed in a container, cans of caviar in a suitcase or baby chimpanzees in a crate. The smuggling of wildlife goods is a low-risk, high-profit enterprise proving increasingly attractive to crime syndicates.
Exports of wildlife, including fisheries and timber, are estimated at $150 billion to $200 billion a year. The illicit side of the business is likely worth tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19092695/ “Read the Story”) (AP via MSNBC)
It took only days to create what was touted as the world’s largest artificial reef in 1972, when a well-intentioned group dumped hundreds of thousands of old tires into the ocean.
But the tires turned out to be a reef killer, turning a swath of ocean floor the size of 31 football fields into a dead zone. Now divers expect to spend years hauling them to the surface.
Weather permitting, divers will spend the summer months for the next three years bringing up the 700,000 tires while leaving behind the ones that seem to have remained in place — at least for now.
The tires will be trucked to a Georgia facility where they will be burned to power a paper recycling plant at a cost to Florida of $2 million.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19102112/ “Read the Story”) (AP via MSNBC)
The new Honda Accord, which will go on sale in September, will *not* be available in a gasoline-electric hybrid version, according to a company spokesman.
Honda claims that its hybrid system works better on smaller cars.
Honda previously announced that it will introduce a new hybrid car in 2009. That car will be smaller in size and less expensive than the Honda Civic Hybrid.
Hybrids accounted for 14% of Toyota Camrys sold last month, but just 1.4% of Accords, according to data from Power Information Networks.
[Read](http://www.cnn.com/2007/AUTOS/06/05/honda_dropping_hybrid/index.html?eref=rss_topstories “Read the Story”) (CNN)
Officials in [Inner Mongolia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_mongolia “Wikipedia’s Inner Mongolia entry”) say they have established a living barrier of trees, grass and shrubs wide enough to hold back the [Gobi desert](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert “Wikipedia’s Gobi desert entry”) and to curb the sandstorms blowing over northeast Asia and hitting the United States.
The desert has been marching southeast at a rate of three kilometres a year heading directly for Beijing, but the expansion has stopped, at least for now, officials say.
[Read](http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/06/green_wall_of_china_aims_to_ho.php “Read the Story”) (SEED Magazine)
[Read](http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/280316/1/.html “Read the Story”) (Channel NewsAsia)
In just the last month, coyotes have shown up on the streets of Detroit, in a sandwich shop in downtown Chicago and at a mattress store in Kansas City, Mo. A 5-year-old boy in Middletown, N.J., about 40 miles from New York City, was bitten by one last week and needed 46 stitches to the head.
The remarkably adaptive animals, famous for roaming rural stretches, have long been spotted in cities and suburban areas, but some naturalists suspect the ranks of urban coyotes may be swelling as they migrate from the open spaces of the West toward the East and the Midwest.
[Read](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18911309/ “Read the Story”) (AP via MSNBC)
An invasive beetle that has killed more than 20 million ash trees in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Canada is heading south toward Virginia, according to officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The [Emerald Ash Borer](http://www.answers.com/topic/emerald-ash-borer “Answers.com Emerald Ash Borer Page”) beetle, discovered in Michigan five years ago, was found at a nursery in Maryland last year, raising concerns that its next target is Virginia. Although the USDA set up quarantines, experts say the insect is difficult to control. A specialist at Ohio State University, said the beetle is heading south as ash trees diminish in the Great Lakes region.
Read (Harrisonburg Daily News Record)
Day in and day out, children across the U.S. are riding to school on aging buses, breathing what some activists say is a dangerous brew of pollutants up to five times dirtier than the air outside.
It is a situation that Congress and many states have sought to fix in recent years. In fact, in 2005 federal lawmakers passed a measure to replace or retrofit the dirtiest diesel engines across the nation, but little has been done.
Around the country, state officials are struggling to find the money to carry out clean school bus initiatives, and Congress has yet to deliver on the $1 billion it promised over five years to help states clean up diesel fleets, including school buses.
Read (AP via MSNBC)
Ethanol has long been touted as a cleaner-burning alternative to gasoline and it carries the image of an environmentally friendly fuel since it’s derived from plants and plant waste. Experts say replacing gas with ethanol blends will reduce greenhouse gases and help the fight against global warming.
But the more than 200 U.S. refineries in operation or under construction — mostly in a swath from Nebraska and Kansas east into Ohio — also emit thousands of tons of pollutants a year, including nitrogen oxide, a key element of smog.
Increased use of ethanol could raise smog levels about 1 percent in some areas of the country, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Read (AP via MSNBC)
In a basement laboratory tucked amid the tourist attractions of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, two Israeli-born scientists are unlocking the mysteries of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab.
Over the past five years, they have spent most of their waking hours poring over tanks filled with the snapping crustaceans and their tiny offspring at a University of Maryland lab on Pratt Street. They feed the crabs homemade algae tailored to their life stage. The researchers control the water temperature, light and salinity, and document the crustaceans’ every move as they shed their shells, mate and reproduce. Once the young crabs are strong enough, the scientists pack them on boats and release them in secluded coves near the Chesapeake Bay.
The scientists are leading a team of researchers from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute and four other institutions around the country in an effort to do what no one thought could be done — raise crabs in a hatchery, then put them in the bay and watch how they live. The goal is eventually to increase the population of crabs reproducing in the Chesapeake Bay — a feat that scientists say has not been accomplished in any body of water anywhere in the world.
Some doubt that it will work. Not only would the hatchery have to produce many millions of crabs to make a difference in the bay, but past attempts to restock the world’s waterways with hatchery-raised fish have been expensive disasters. Raising crabs in a hatchery is difficult because they endure nine larval stages in three weeks — each requiring a precise temperature and food. And crabs are cannibalistic — the hard ones eat the soft ones, which have shed their shell to grow.
Read (Baltimore Sun)