The loss of wetlands in the prairie pothole region of central North America due to a warmer and drier climate will negatively affect millions of waterfowl that depend on the region for food, shelter and raising young, according to research published today in the journal BioScience.

The image you are seeing is the result of a specialized phorid fly laying its egg in the head of a fire ant, which eventually kills its host. This video from Discovery News was posted in 2008, and chronicles one entomologists efforts to combat invasive fire ant populations that originate in Brazil and are spreading throughout the Southern United States.

A collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the JBEI researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids.

We just received a release from the European Space Agency with the first satellite map of Haiti since being devastated by the earthquake.

"A major 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on 12 January, causing major casualties and damage. The quake was followed by several aftershocks with magnitudes over 5.0.

This European Space Agency (ESA), conference brought together nearly 200 scientists from more than 30 countries.

Researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have overcome three challenges in the production of bioethanol from agricultural waste by inserting a single gene from the bacterium Escherichia coli into the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The invention is published in this weeks journal of "Applied and Environmental Microbiology".

For years, geology textbooks have described the 'Biogenic' theory - what is thought to be the only way oil and natural gas form in the Earth's subsurface. It is simply a product of compression and heating of ancient organic materials over geological time.

In a significant win for the little guy, an obscure member of an ancient group of organisms was recently discovered to be a primary mover and shaker in the processing of nitrogen worldwide. Once considered to be an insignificant player in oceanic processes, the strain known as Nitrosopumilus maritimus has demonstrated the ability to outcompete newer, larger species in the hunt for ammonia.

Beginning this week, the Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia will try a new strategy for dealing with its gas problems: it will bury them. Maligned by many for the large quantities of undesirable emissions, coal driven power plants such as Mountaineer will soon be trying out the first commercial demonstration of the technology known as sequestration, in which an unwanted compound is bound up chemically for later disposal. Carbon dioxide may be nearly impossible to filter out in its gas form, but once it has reacted with ammonium carbonate it can be compressed and liquefied for underground disposal. Once underground, the CO2 would slowly seep into microscopic pores before reacting harmlessly with assorted minerals.

While the scope of the Mountaineer project - half a million tons of carbon dioxide over the next five years - accounts for only a small fraction of the plants total emissions, success could pave the way for higher efficiency and more widespread usage in the future.

From TED.com comes James Balog's guided tour of the time lapse footage shot of glaciers in Alaska, Iceland and Greenland by him and his team. The footage reveals extereme ice loss over a period of three years. As he says the footage can be watched over and over with a hypnotic effect of watching the glacier come to life.