Word: forest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Researchers at Wake Forest University who study stress in monkeys think they may have discovered a clue: fat. More specifically, the particular form of fat called visceral fat, which tends to build up in the abdomen (those dreaded beer bellies and love handles). Researchers believe this abdominal fat lodges deep within visceral organs, such as the heart, liver and blood vessels, and may be an indicator of increased heart-attack risk. In a study of 42 female monkeys, the scientists found that those with the most social stress - in the monkeys' case, that meant being at the bottom...
...people will still want to buy cars, still need to buy houses, still want to read quality journalism, watch TV series and movies at home, listen to recorded music, and all the rest. And so starting now, as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic forest fall, the seedlings and saplings - that is, the people determined to produce and sell new kinds of transportation and housing and media and other merchandise in new, economically rational ways - will have a clearer field in which to grow...
There are aerial pleasures to be had, too. The Tree Top Walk takes you into the forest canopy on wooden bridges and offers two observation decks: a natural high, like much else at O'Reilly's. For more information, see www.oreillys.com.au...
...adolescents are the risk takers. But the ultimate point is that orangutans, as odd and ungainly as they look, are uniquely adapted to the jungle, to life among the trees - an existence that is being threatened by the continued logging of Southeast Asian jungles. "Orangutans can move in logged forest, but the energetic cost may be much greater, and food availability is likely to be lower, so populations become less healthy and less viable in the long term," says Thorpe. A 2007 United Nations report estimated that if current trends continue, 98% of forests in Sumatra and Borneo could...
...then there's the Amazon. Right now, the rain forest is a huge carbon sink, which compensates for the greenhouse gases we release by burning fossil fuels. But if the climate warms so much that the rain forest begins to die off - a distinct possibility - we'll lose that carbon sink, and then warming will again accelerate. Scientists, including the authors of the Science study, are still trying to nail down exactly where these tipping points might be - but it seems that the more we find out, the more the evidence points to an increasingly sensitive climate. And that...