In May of 2013, in the Cumberland Mountains of North Eastern Tennessee, Dr. Henry Streby from UC Berkeley and his colleagues from the Universities of Tennessee and Minnesota captured and equipped 20 tiny golden warblers with geo-locators to see if their migration patterns could be tracked in this way. Eleven months later, in April 2014, the scientists were celebrating the unexpected success of their pilot study after 10 of the 20 birds returned to nest – with tracking devices in tact – following a 3100-mile return trip home from Columbia, South America.
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Our inner emotions are very powerful, and it is becoming more widely accepted by science that they can have profound and measurable physiological effects.

Stress is known to have negative effects on the body, but what about more positive emotions, such as happiness, joy and awe?
Can feeling deeply moving sentiments change our bodies, our minds, maybe even our souls?
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Twelve months ago, a study revealed a shocking decline in the global populations of so-called "priority species" creatures. The evidence suggested a 58 per cent drop in 210 key species during the forty year period between 1970 and 2010, with seven per cent being lost within the past five years.

It seems that the decline is not restricted to endangered or priority species, however, as new research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found that the global situation is even worse than previously thought. According to a new analysis, in which 10,000 different populations of animals, birds and fish were examined, the number of all wild animals on Earth has more than halved during the past 40 years.
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Astronomers continue in their quest to discover alien life forms in the cosmos, but naturalists suggest that they should look closer to home as there is still a host of undiscovered species lurking on our own planet.

This month a species that has defied classification for thirty years has finally been named by scientists, though they are still no further forward in determining what they are.

The weird species, described for the first time recently in the journal PLOS ONE, poses the question of how much we really know about life on this planet.
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