News tagged with soil
Obstacles no barrier to higher speeds for worms, researchers find
Obstacles in an organism's path can help it to move faster, not slower, researchers from New York University's Applied Math Lab at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences have found through a series ...
Feb 08, 2012 |
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New study links high levels of cadmium, lead in blood to pregnancy delay
Higher blood levels of cadmium in females, and higher blood levels of lead in males, delayed pregnancy in couples trying to become pregnant, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and other ...
Feb 08, 2012 |
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New insights: How soil production processes respond to erosion
In many ways, soil is fundamental to life. Flora and fauna depend on its presence for their survival as much as they depend on water and air. In order to sustain its soil content, an ecosystem needs to maintain ...
Feb 08, 2012 |
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The hills are evolving: New model predicts speed of spreading valleys
From high above the Florida Panhandle, the Apalachicola Bluffs -- a winding system of steep ravines -- look like the branching veins of a leaf.
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Feb 06, 2012 |
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Tree rings may underestimate climate response to volcanic eruptions: study
Some climate cooling caused by past volcanic eruptions may not be evident in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature change because large enough temperature drops lead to greatly shortened or even absent growing seasons, ...
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Feb 05, 2012 |
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Surface of Mars an unlikely place for life after 600 million year drought, say scientists
Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet's surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Feb 03, 2012 |
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Roundworm research reviewed in Science publication
There are 16,000 types of parasitic roundworms causing illnesses in humans and animals. Controlling their effects on health becomes more difficult as the medicines used to treat them become less effective. A University of ...
Feb 03, 2012 |
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Cactus may give farmers a cure for poisoned crop land
The prickly pear cactus may not sound like a trendy cash crop, but it could become a phenomenon among farmers on the arid west side of California's San Joaquin Valley.
Feb 02, 2012 |
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Green potential of our industrial past
Manipulating the soil in urban and industrial areas in order to capture more carbon from the atmosphere is the “best resource we have to begin to mitigate human CO2 emissions”, experts claim.
Feb 02, 2012 |
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Bacterial plasmids -- the freeloading and the heavy-lifters -- balance the high price of disease
Studying self-replicating genetic units, called plasmids, found in one of the world's widest-ranging pathogenic soil bacteria -- the crown-gall-disease-causing microorganism Agrobacterium tumefaciens -- Ind ...
Feb 01, 2012 |
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Yellow-cedar are dying in Alaska: Scientists now know why
Yellow-cedar, a culturally and economically valuable tree in southeastern Alaska and adjacent parts of British Columbia, has been dying off across large expanses of these areas for the past 100 years. But ...
Feb 01, 2012 |
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Analysis of generalized linear mixed models
A new and first of its kind book provides a practical guide for the use of modern statistical methods within agricultural and natural resources sciences. Analysis of Generalized Linear Mixed Models in the Agricultural and ...
Jan 31, 2012 |
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Russia blames radiation for space probe failure
The head of Russia's space agency said Tuesday that cosmic radiation was the most likely cause of the failure of a Mars moon probe that crashed to Earth this month, and suggested that a low-quality imported ...
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Jan 31, 2012 |
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Biodiversity enhances ecosystems global drylands: researchers
An international team of researchers including Dr. Bertrand Boeken of the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev suggest in a new study that plant biodiversity preservation is ...
Jan 30, 2012 |
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New biodiversity map of the Andes shows species in dire need of protection
The Andes-Amazon basin of Peru and Bolivia is one of the most biologically rich and rapidly changing areas of the world. A new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology has used information collec ...
Jan 27, 2012 |
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Soil
Soil is a natural body consisting of layers (soil horizons) of mineral constituents of variable thicknesses, which differ from the parent materials in their morphological, physical, chemical, and mineralogical characteristics. It is composed of particles of broken rock that have been altered by chemical and environmental processes that include weathering and erosion. Soil differs from its parent rock due to interactions between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and the biosphere. It is a mixture of mineral and organic constituents that are in solid, gaseous and aqueous states. Soil particles pack loosely, forming a soil structure filled with pore spaces. These pores contain sol solution (liquid) and air (gas). Accordingly, soils are often treated as a three state system. Most soils have a density between 1 and 2 g/cm³. Soil is also known as earth: it is the substance from which our planet takes its name. Little of the soil composition of planet Earth is older than Tertiary and most no older than Pleistocene. In engineering, soil is referred to as regolith, or loose rock material.
For more information about Soil, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
