Volcanologists do what they can to provide the public enough warning about impending eruptions, but volcanoes are notoriously unpredictable. Alerts are sometimes given with little time for people to react. That may soon change. Work led by research assistant professor Társilo Girona, with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, has revealed a method by […]
With a $42,000 grant from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak and the Alutiiq Museum are collaborating on a study of ancestral Alutiiq rock art. The project, which started in January, is helping museum archaeologists study areas with known or suspected petroglyphs. Petroglyphs, or rock carvings, are a traditional form […]
For centuries, humans have blamed the moon for our moods, accidents and even natural disasters. But new research indicates that our planet’s celestial companion impacts something else entirely — our sleep. In a paper published Jan. 27 in Science Advances, scientists at the University of Washington, the National University of Quilmes in Argentina and Yale University report […]
Seafood is the world’s most highly traded food commodity, by value, and the product is hard to track from source to market. Reports of seafood mislabeling have increased over the past decade, but few studies have considered the overall environmental effects of this deceptive practice. A study by Arizona State University, the University of Washington […]
Within their bulbous bodies, Steller sea lions of the western Aleutian Islands seem to carry more mercury than sea lions closer to mainland Alaska. By looking at tiny bits of fish and squid, a graduate student is trying to find out where that mercury is coming from. Steller sea lions drape their chocolate bodies […]
Biologist Stacia Backensto has fooled a raven. When trying to recapture birds on Alaska’s North Slope during her graduate student days at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she wore a moustache and beard. She also strapped pillows to her waist. “By the time I got around to the beard and the duct-taping of the […]
A study released Tuesday by a team of scientists from Harvard University found that airborne radiation levels downwind of U.S. fracking sites are significantly elevated compared to background levels, providing further evidence that the drilling practice poses a threat to public health as well as the climate. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study detected the largest […]
The rapidly melting Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park could create a new ocean bay, one feature in what may be the largest landscape transformation underway in the United States. To better understand these changes, the National Science Foundation recently awarded researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and two partner […]
For nearly 50 years, a statistical omission tantamount to data falsification sat undiscovered in a critical study at the heart of regulating one of the most controversial and widely used pesticides in America. Chlorpyrifos, an insecticide created in the late 1960s by the Dow Chemical Co., has been linked to serious health problems, especially in […]