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Bird migration timing across North America has been affected by climate change, according to a study published Feb. 22 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

Bats in North America are under a two-pronged attack but they are not the only victim - so is the U.S. economy. Gary McCracken, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, analyzed the economic impact of the loss of bats in North America in agriculture and found it to be in the $3.7 to $53 billion a year range.

A San Francisco State University biologist has released the initial results of her nationwide citizen science project to count bee populations and has found low numbers of bees in urban areas across America, adding weight to the theory that habitat loss is one of the primary reasons for sharp declines in the population of bees and other important pollinators.

In an event flanked with all the electric cars that have recently come to market, and a handful of those that are poised for sale later this year, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa flipped the switch May 13 on the 500th electric-vehicle charging station installed by Coulomb Technologies as part of its ChargePoint America network.

The US president has urged Chinese leaders to implement policies to help create a more balanced economic relationship between Washington and Beijing. Barack Obama also raised concerns about the human rights situation in China in talks with Wang Qishan, the Chinese vice-premier, and the state councillor, Dai Bingguo, at the White House in Washington on Monday. Obama and the Chinese leaders discussed ways of working together to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programmes, the White House said in a statement.

As America struggles down the road toward a coherent energy policy that focuses on a higher degree of self-reliance, policymakers face numerous issues and realities. These include: the finite supply and environmental impact of fossil fuels, the feasibility and costs to implement a widespread switch to renewable energy sources, and the variables that lead to consumers' preferences for particular types of power generation.

For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent.

Agricultural producers and waterfowl will benefit from a project at South Dakota State University that uses an innovative plant-breeding technique to shave perhaps two years off the time needed to produce winter wheat varieties for farmers in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America.

Going the farthest distance might sound like a foot race. But this past weekend, it meant stretching the boundaries of fuel efficiency as student teams competed in the fifth annual Shell Eco-marathon Americas, a challenge for students to design, build and test fuel-efficient vehicles that travel the farthest distance using the least amount of energy. High school and university students from Canada and the United States competed in the two-day street course challenge in downtown Houston.

In the growing global battle against substandard and counterfeit medicines, the Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) program has launched a new, public database of medicines collected and analyzed in collaboration with stakeholders from countries in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Free of charge and available to anyone with access to the internet, the Medicines Quality Database (MQDB) includes information on the quality of medicines collected from a variety of sources. To date, more than 8700 records of tested samples collected from Ghana, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Peru, Guyana and Colombia have been entered into the database.

A team of scientists from Aberystwyth University, the University of Exeter and Stockholm University, led by Welsh scientist and Professor Neil Glasser, have released at study published in Nature Geoscience showing that the glaciers of Patagonia in South America are melting at a much faster rate than originally thought.

thanks to a research project that is the next best thing to time travel, DeJong is measuring the duck eggs in several museum collections - from the Smithsonian Institution, in this case, where Bendire was the first curator of the discipline known as oology, or the study of birds' eggs. When her project is done, DeJong will have assembled and analyzed a metrics database on perhaps 60,000 duck eggs representing at least 40 species and subspecies of ducks found in North America.

Researchers in America have shown that ozone -- a known pollutant at low levels in the earth's atmosphere, causing harmful effects on the respiratory system and sensitive plants -- can be reduced, on average, when electric vehicle charging is done at night time.

While many Western retail giants have failed to translate their American success in this booming economy, Apple is winning simply by being Apple.

There is a vitally important national and state-level discussion taking place about how to address the government's frighteningly large deficits while limiting disruptions for all Americans. But while federal and state actions affect us all, much of what concerns Americans most directly and personally happens closer to home and increasingly, this means in our cities. Budget cuts simply can't derail efforts to make our cities smarter. Today our nation's cities are facing a "perfect storm." For many cities, their populations are growing at the same time that their budgets are shrinking. Today, for the first time, more than 50% of the world's population lives in cities. In the last decade large metropolitan areas in the U.S. grew by a combined 10% - nearly double the rate of the rest of the country. Our large metro areas now house two thirds of America's total population. They have become the dominant forces in our economy and society.