Polar bears and Inuit communities have become victims in the public war of words on climate change and wildlife conservation, according to researchers from Britain and Canada.
University of Exeter geographer Dr Martina Tyrrell and Dr Doug Clark from the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability examined the fallout from a media campaign in the run-up to the March 2013 proposal to severely limit or prohibit trade in polar bears under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
The risk of extreme versions of the El Niño weather phenomenon will double over the coming decades due to global warming, new research has shown.
The frequency of ‘extreme El Niños’ could see a twofold increase as the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean warms faster than the surrounding regions.
The last major events in 1982-3 and 1997-98, when sea surface temperatures exceeding 28°C developed in the normally cold and dry eastern equatorial Pacific, caused a massive reorganisation of global rainfall.
The impact of these events, including extreme floods and droughts,...
New models predict 3.5-10 mm sea-level rise over the next 20 years. An international team of scientists has shown that Pine Island Glacier, the largest single contributor to sea-level rise in Antarctica, has entered a period of irreversible, self-sustained retreat and is likely to increase its discharge into the ocean in comparison to the last decade.
The current imbalance of the West Antarctic ice sheet and its related contribution to ongoing sea-level rise is well established. In particular, Pine Island Glacier has receded by about 10km during the last decade and alone...
Exeter women are being urged to join forces and show cancer who’s boss by signing up to Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life 2014 which is now open for entries. Women have now got the choice of signing up for a 5K or 10K Race for Life this summer in Exeter as event organisers look to challenge more ladies to take part.
Every day, around 84 people are diagnosed with cancer in the South West *. Everyone is special, everyone is somebody’s mum, dad, brother, sister, friend or colleague.
And that’s why Cancer Research UK is calling on Exeter women of all ages, shapes and sizes...
The eastern Sahara Desert was once home to a 45,000 km2 freshwater lake similar in surface area to the largest in the world today. A study led by the University of Exeter has revealed that the mega lake was probably formed more than one hundred thousand years ago in the White Nile River Valley in Sudan. Dr Tim Barrows of the University of Exeter and colleagues used a dating approach based on exposure to cosmic rays to measure the amount of the isotope beryllium-10 in shoreline deposits. Its abundance can be used to calculate how long rocks or sediments have been exposed at the surface of...
Diabetes research led by the University of Exeter Medical School has underlined the importance of people with diabetes achieving their blood sugar goals, to reduce the risk of complications.
The team analysed people with a specific genetic change (Glucokinase Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young, or MODY), which means they have elevated blood glucose levels from birth. These higher levels mimic guidelines issued to people with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
International guidelines have proposed that patients with diabetes should keep their HbA1c (a measure of long term...
Patients have expressed an appetite for potential cancer symptoms to be checked out much sooner than current NHS thresholds guidelines suggest, new research has revealed. A study led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues at the University of Exeter Medical School and the University of Cambridge, found that 88 per cent of participants opted for further investigation, even if their symptoms carried just a one per cent risk of indicating cancer. Although no fixed threshold is defined for the UK, in practice, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines suggest that...
The University of Exeter Students’ Guild is delighted to invite Exeter residents to its open lecture series, Research Uncovered.
The series opens on Monday 13 January 2014 when Professor David Boughey will present ‘Adventurous Capitalists and the Forging of Multinational Enterprise’.
Research Uncovered has been developed by the Students' Guild from the FRUNI scheme which invites students to nominate the best research field in which they have been lectured. Students are then called upon to vote for the lecture topics that they believe should be shared again with a wider...
New research on pond snails has revealed that high levels of stress can block memory processes.
Researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of Calgary trained snails and found that when they were exposed to multiple stressful events they were unable remember what they had learned. Previous research has shown that stress also affects human ability to remember. This study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, found that experiencing multiple stressful events simultaneously has a cumulative detrimental effect on memory. Dr Sarah Dalesman, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career...
Following the long-running success of BBC Two’s living history series, Victorian, Edwardian and Wartime Farm, a new series will be exploring life at the end of the Middle Ages in Tudor Monastery Farm. University of Exeter historian Professor James Clark was the programme consultant for the six part series in which he features onscreen as the team’s guide and mentor from the monastery, dressed in an authentic medieval habit. The first episode of the new TV series will be broadcast on Wednesday 13 November at 9pm.
The programme will turn the clock back to the year 1500, as a team of...
