Word: bigs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...climate change. Generally, the sheep's life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then the harsh winter comes, the grass disappears and the smallest, scrawniest sheep die off, while their bigger cousins survive. That's how you end up with big sheep, which - according to Darwin's laws of natural selection - will pass on their big genes to the next generation. (See pictures of sheep and other animals...
...sheep to survive. Then they go on to have offspring that tend to be small themselves - and have a better chance of survival because of the increasingly mild winters. "The environmental and evolutionary processes are intertwined," says Coulson "There's still natural selection, but it's not leaving as big a signature as it used to. There's still a disadvantage to being small, but not as much." (Read "The Fine Art of Sheep-Shearing - for Fun and Profit...
...while being big is still an advantage - size offers a better survival cushion if food proves hard to find - there are other factors that limit how easily that trait is passed down. Coulson and his colleagues identified what they call the "young mum" factor. Sheep, unlike many other mammals, tend to have offspring quite early in life - mothers can have lambs at one-year-old, before they're fully grown. Since the size of the lambs is limited by the size of the mothers, younger mothers have smaller babies. Thanks to the milder winters, more sheep are able to survive...
...Webster explains it, the thousands of miles of westward shift of Pacific Ocean warming seen during an El Niño Modoki essentially shifts the Atlantic hurricanes westward as well. "It's as if you had a big aquarium with a Bunsen burner below it," he says. "The heat causes a rising and sinking motion in the water. If you shift the position of the burner, you shift the motion of the water too." The El Niño Modokis also result in reduced vertical wind shear and therefore promote the creation of hurricanes. (When vertical wind shear...
...such as Chevron and ExxonMobil have stayed out of investing in the Kurdish zone for fear that investing there might prompt Baghdad to blacklist them from bidding for the far larger fields down South. But those fears have diminished as the stalemate in parliament over oil has dragged on. Big Oil might also be emboldened to make deals on oil fields in the Kurdish areas since last week, when the Chinese oil giant Sinopec announced that it was acquiring the Swiss oil company Addax Petroleum, which operates in Iraqi Kurdistan. "It will be much more difficult to blacklist Sinopec," says...