Source: UCI University of California Press Release - Irvine, Calif., March 7, 2016 — On a cool, fog-shrouded mountain of Costa Rica, University of California, Irvine biologist Caitlin Looby is finding that warming temperatures are becoming an increasing problem for one of the most ecologically diverse places on Earth. Seeking to determine how shifts in the tropical mountain cloud forest eco...

Dr Franklin Chang-Diaz Earlier today, President of Costa Rica Luis Guillermo Solis opened the United Nations Workshop on Human Space Technology, a five-day international workshop on human space technology that will take place in  San José until March 11th.   Keynote speeches were delivered by Dr. Franklin Chang Diaz, CEO of the Ad Astra Rocket Company and Hall of Fame NASA astronaut...

Source: SpaceX Twitter Washington, Mar 5 (EFE).- U.S. private aerospace company SpaceX successfully launched a commercial communications satellite into orbit but later failed to land the rocket that carried it on a drone ship at sea. The SES-9 satellite, owned by Luxembourg-based communications satellite operator SES, entered into orbit at 6:35 p.m. local time Friday after being launched by...

Wikimedia Commons archive photo Mexico City, Mar 5 (EFE).- Mexico's National Protected Natural Areas Commission, or Conanp, has reported the sighting of an albino whale in waters of the El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve that was last spotted by Mexican authorities more than five years ago when it was still a calf. During the annual whale census taken by Conanp in that northwestern area of the c...

sh2-106 region. Wikimedia Commons Berlin, Mar 3 (EFE).- The European Southern Observatory's VLT telescope in Paranal, Chile, has captured images of an enormous ruby-colored gas cloud with giant imbedded stars whose origin remains a mystery to astronomers. The image, released by the ESO at its headquarters in Garching, Germany, shows in detail the massive nebulae where the giants were born. ...

Pixabay Public Domain Widener University Press Release - The lush, coffee-producing landscape of Costa Rica has been a destination for Widener University students and faculty to conduct research and participate in learning experiences for a decade, but the university now has a permanent hub in the Central American country to call home. The university has purchased a four-bedroom villa outfi...

Wikimedia Commons Buenos Aires, Mar 2 (EFE).- A total of 23 Franciscana dolphins have been found dead in recent days on different beaches in Argentina, prompting an investigation. That figure was confirmed to EFE Wednesday by the Mundo Marino foundation, which received reports of the dolphin deaths and has arranged for studies to determine why the animals lost their lives. "They've appea...

Zika is spread by the Aedes aegyptie mosquito (Wikimedia Commons) Santiago, Feb 29 (EFE).- With an unusual mixture of organic ingredients that "were not in its plans," the Chilean company Grupo Avance says it has discovered an innovative formula that acts as a repellent of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, carrier of the Zika virus, dengue fever and other diseases. "We got to this by merging seve...

Solar Energy Park in Guanacaste, Costa Rica Palm Beach, FL, February 25, 2016 --(PR.com)-- Sun Fund Americas, SRL, a renewable energy development company headquartered in Liberia, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and concentrating on the Caribbean and Central American markets has signed a 20mw Solar Power Purchase Agreement in the island nation of Jamaica. The project represents an investment of $50 mi...

Luke Lehrer - Flickr Commons Dental tourists often travel to Costa Rica for affordable restoration procedures that involve implantation, a popular treatment that rarely presents complications. Although modern implantation techniques make this procedure minimally invasive, there is always a potential risk of infection that dental professionals and patients must consider. At the New Smile Den...

File photo HSI Press Release - The Costa Rican Minister of Environment presented the country’s official stance on wildlife, stating that wildlife issues are a priority to the nation. During a press conference, Minister Edgar Gutiérrez highlighted the importance of respecting wildlife in a country where tourist activities are developed around its natural resources and are one of Costa Rica’s ma...

Source: Sloth Institute Nature’s Miracle Orphans, a special program produced for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), has twice visited Costa Rica to tell the story of Monster, a female sloth rescued by primatologist Sam Trull of the Sloth Institute, located in Manuel Antonio. The BBC program is an observational documentary series following orphaned baby animals and the dedicated peo...

WirelessDevNet.com Press Release - ICT professionals and government policy makers wanting to present their strategies for progressing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals at the IFIP World Information Technology Forum (WITFOR) 2016 have two weeks to submit their papers and demo proposals for review. March 1st 2016 is the deadline for submissions, with the event scheduled to be held...

President Chinchilla Listens to Minister Cruz MEXICO CITY, Feb. 17, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and GBM Corporation, a leading IT integration company in the Central American and Caribbean region, today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the use of IBM's Watson cognitive computing capabilities in Latin America. GBM has created a new company, Cognitiva, for this purpose in ...

Wikimedia Commons According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which we all learned in school as a way of understanding how gravity works, bodies moving through space are affected by deformation, or warping.  Amazingly, last Thursday a team of scientists announced that they had recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light years away, thereby providing scientific pro...

Flickr Commons Although Costa Rica has adopted a very proactive stance in terms of promoting wireless data networks as a means to bridge the digital divide, the current Long Term Evolution (LTE) strategy is one of the most deficient in the world. According to the State of LTE report published by the developers of the crowdsourced OpenSignal mobile app in February, the LTE spectrum in Costa ...

Ana Helena Chacon Echeverria, Vice President of the Republic of Costa Rica witnessed the signing of the document. Source: Cisco Cisco Press Release - SAN JOSE, Costa Rica 11 February 2016 – In order to exchange information and share best practices to support the digital agenda for Costa Rica, the Telecommunications Vice Ministry, a specialized unit from MICITT (Ministerio de Ciencia Tecnología...

By Mar Centenera Buenos Aires, Feb 8 (EFE).- The Aedes aegypti mosquito is considered "a perfect virus-spreading machine" by scientists at Argentina's Center for Plagues and Insecticides Research, or Cipein, which studies the insect's preferences and phobias to fight it and contain dengue, Zika and Chikunguña epidemics. Females of the species, able to lay an average of 100 to 300 eggs, bite ...

Areli Arevalo Facebook On Saturday afternoon, geologists at the Observatory on Volcanology and Seismology at the National University of Costa Rica (Spanish acronym: OVSICORI) reported a new eruption at the Turrialba Volcano, the most active colossus in our country. The volcanic event took place about ten minutes before 2:00 pm during a warm, yet extremely windy, afternoon. The seismographic...

Upper left: Ringed kingfisher. Bottom left: Strawberry poison-dart frog. Center left: A bunch of bananas and a black-cheeked woodpecker. (Aforementioned photos by Kenshiro Imamura.) Center-right top: Agouti. Center-right bottom: Baird's tapir. Right: Brown-throated tree-toed sloth. Source: JICA Japan International Cooperation Agency News Release - In the biodiversity hot spot of Costa Rica...

Source: Maxam By Maria M. Mur Panama City, Feb 4 (EFE).- The 3,500 blasts that Spain-based multinational Maxam has detonated as part of the Panama Canal's expansion have been one of the biggest technological challenges for the firm, a leader in staged explosions in mining and public works projects. "It has been a very important technological challenge for us," Maxam international relatio...

Jason-3 is the latest in over twenty years of ocean-monitoring satellites. Image credit: NASA LOS ANGELES (VOA) Scientists from the U.S. and Europe have a new eye in the sky monitoring the world's oceans. The Jason-3 satellite, launched on January 17, is the latest satellite to monitor rising sea levels. Scientists say data collected by satellites over the last two decades shows sea levels ris...

Wikimedia Commons An attempt to plant transgenic cotton for research purposes in Costa Rica is being challenged in court. According to a news report recently filed by Carlos Arrieta Perez of online news daily El Pais, a legislator from Frente Amplio (Broad Front) and a few non-profit groups dedicated to environmental protection claim that the transgenic cotton seeds contain traces of Agent Ora...

Miravalles geothermal power plant WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--With demand for clean electricity on the rise, international attention has turned to geothermal energy with a highlight being the declaration of 38 countries forming the Global Geothermal Alliance at the Paris Climate Conference. Building on this momentum, the Geothermal Energy Association's (GEA) U.S. and International Geothermal ...

Rain forest in Costa Rica OSU Press Release. CORVALLIS, Ore. – As tropical forests become increasingly broken up by roads, farm fields, pastures and other developments, corridors of trees provide vital pathways for pollinators and contribute to a rich diversity of plant species, scientists have confirmed. A study at the Las Cruces Biological Station in Costa Rica shows that when forests are...

Source: iCafe BioNovelus, a clean tech company that aims to offer a portfolio of green solutions for various applications, recently received positive results from lab and field trials showing BioNovelus’ technology as an effective, eco-friendly biopesticide against Hemileia vastatrix, the fungus named “coffee rust,” or “roya” in Central and South America. The company hopes to put this eco-f...

Wikimedia Commons London, Jan 27 (EFE).- A team of U.S. researchers has developed a method for screening thousands of chemicals for toxicity without testing them on animals, an article in the scientific journal Nature Communications said. A team led by Ruili Huang, of the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or NCATS, conducted the Tox21 stud...

By Alba Santandreu Piracicaba, Brazil, Jan 27 (EFE).- Roughly 800,000 genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are being released per week in the Brazilian city of Piracicaba to combat that insect, a transmitter of the dengue and zika viruses that has confounded health authorities in Brazil and other Latin American countries. Unlike other mosquitoes, the "good" Aedes aegypti, as it is c...

Pixabay Commons The Second Meeting of Signatories (MOS2) to the Memorandum of Understanding on the Conservation of Migratory Sharks will be held in the capital city of Costa Rica in mid-February. As previously reported by The Costa Rica Star, our country became signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) with regard to shark conse...

Source: NASA00 Washington, Jan 19 (EFE).- NASA published photographs of the first flower grown on board the International Space Station as part of a 2-year experiment to raise plants in space. Although astronauts had grown lettuce and other vegetables in their space garden, this is the first time that flowers - zinnias, in particular, which are edible - have bloomed outside Earth's gravity....

ALMA instrument array in Atacama, Chile Santiago, Jan 18 (EFE).- International astronomers in Chile on Monday began a hunt for an Earthlike exoplanet, focusing their efforts on the closest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri, using the 3.6-meter La Silla telescope at the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama desert. The observatory is located at an altitude of 2,400 meters (ab...

BirdSongSOS.com Imagine a world without birdsong. Su Rynard’s wide-ranging and contemplative documentary THE MESSENGER explores our deep-seated connection to birds and warns that the uncertain fate of songbirds might mirror our own. Moving from the northern reaches of the Boreal Forest to the base of Mount Ararat in Turkey and from the streets of New York to the coffee farms of Costa Rica, ...

Wikimedia Commons By Maria Clara Montoya Lima, Jan 13 (EFE; additional context by The Costa Rica Star).- Scientists at Peru's International Potato Center, or CIP, are working on a project to explore the possibility of growing potatoes on Mars. The idea for the project came from researcher Julio Valdivia, who is conducting studies for NASA and found that the soil in an area in southern Pe...

By Carlos Heras La Paz, Jan 12 (EFE; additional context by The Costa Rica Star).- Agriculture, which accounts for about 15 percent of Bolivia's gross domestic product, is at the center of a controversy over genetically modified crops, with the government limiting the use of transgenic seeds to soybeans and farmers demanding expanded use to increase productivity. Bolivia restricts the use of ...

In 2018, genetically engineered dinosaurs could roam around Costa Rica, thrashing everything in their path and fighting each other as they chase after Hollywood stars. The follow-up episode to the popular Jurassic Park film franchise may move out of Isla Nublar to the mainland of Costa Rica, according to various reports published well ahead of the production schedule. In an exclusive intervi...

Wikimedia Commons By Jairo Mejia Washington, Jan 4 (EFE).- The United States could start a "gold rush" with a new space exploration law covering bodies orbiting in the Solar System's asteroid belt. Just as lawmakers in Washington provided a legal framework for the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, Congress and the administration have given the green light to encourage space mining. ...

Wikimedia Commons In the first study of its kind, a team of international scientists led by UT Southwestern Medical Center and UCLA researchers have identified a dozen inherited traits related to sleep, wake, and activity cycles that are associated with severe bipolar disorder. Researchers also were able to tie the traits to specific chromosomes, providing important clues to the genetic nat...

Caribbean News Service By Desmond Brown, Caribbean News Service (CNS) SAN JOSE – In mid-December, technical officers from six Caribbean countries traveled to Costa Rica to learn about new ways of adding value to cassava production and modern technologies for processing the vegetable, in order to boost the industry, promote the diversification of markets, and improve the chain’s competitiven...

Wikimedia Commons By Julia Talarn Rabascall Santiago, Dec 28 (EFE).- Bacteria surviving under extreme conditions in Antarctic glaciers synthesize fluorescent nanoparticles that could be used to tag tumor cells and track the metastasis in different types of cancers, scientists said. These nanoparticles are produced by microorganisms able to resist high exposure to ultraviolet light, lack ...

Source: iCafe By Joel Clement, Director, Office of Policy Analysis at the United States Department of the Interior How do we work with diverse ecosystems and landscapes to address climate change? How can we help these natural systems build resilience and pull more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? Globally, the degradation of forests, agricultural areas, wetlands and other important la...