These frogs have been steady declining in population due to human cause and non native fish have been preying on them. In recent studies, it has been shown that these little creatures have rapidly been increasing dispite all the things going bad for them. Chief among the culprits in Rana sierrae's once-stark decline is deadly fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, which affects amphibians worldwide and has caused at least 200 species of frogs and salamanders to become extinct within the last 30 years. This fungal disease has believed to be a huge factor in their close to extinction experience. This lead us to a conclusion that frogs have evolved at least partial resistance to the disease. This finding is a huge boost in science because these little guys and others affected by this fungal disease are showing resistance and are evolving.
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Over the years, The biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) has conducted many experiments and studies on biodiversity in forests.To gain more insights into BPR on a global scale, Jingjing Liang et al compiled data from 777,126 sample plots across 44 countries and 13 ecoregions. In total, more than 30 million trees across 8,737 species were tallied and measured. This study recently caught the attention of scientists and policy makers. On a global scale, a 10% decrease in tree species richness would cause a 2 to 3% decline in productivity, which is the rate of biomass production in an ecosystem. A 99% decrease in tree species richness, would result in productivity decline of 62 to 78%. While productivity trends consistently decrease with increased biodiversity loss across nearly all regions of the world, the areas that would experience the greatest productivity decline in absolute terms include the Amazon, West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, Southeastern Africa, Southern China, Myanmar, Nepal, and the Malay Archipelago.
The GRAPES-3 muon telescope recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays of about 20 GeV, on 22 June 2015 lasting for two hours. The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona, and moving with a speed of about 2.5 million kilometers per hour struck our planet, causing a severe compression of Earth's magnetosphere from 11 to 4 times the radius of Earth. It triggered a severe geomagnetic storm that generated aurora borealis, and radio signal blackouts in many high latitude countries. Earth's magnetosphere extends over a radius of a million kilometers, which acts as the first line of defence, shielding us from the continuous flow of solar and galactic cosmic rays, thus protecting life on our planet from these high intensity energetic radiations. Solar storms can cause major disruption to human civilization by crippling large electrical power grids, global positioning systems, satellite operations and communications.
Long-term exposure to air pollution is linked to a greater incidence of high blood pressure, according to the largest study to investigate the effects of both air pollution and traffic noise by following over 41,000 people in five different countries for five to nine years. Traffic noise is associated with an increase in cases of hypertension as well. This is an important finding because there are differing ways of reducing air pollution and noise. Both of the data was collected separately and then joined later as one. Nobody who started the experiment had hypertension when they joined the study, but during the follow-up period 6,207 people (15%) reported that they developed hypertension or started to take blood pressure-lowering medications. Professor Barbara Hoffmann, Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Centre for Health and Society at Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf, Germany, who led the analysis, said: "Our findings show that long-term exposure to particulate air pollution is associated with a higher incidence of self-reported hypertension and with intake of anti-hypertensive medication.I think this is really something to think about because there is traffic noise and air pollution everywhere. People could have high blood pressure and not even know and that could lead to serious health risks.
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