For the year 2030 the snowcapped Nevado del Ruiz mountain top could be completely extinguished. The situation of the Santa Isabel glacier is even more critical and will cease to exist in eight or ten years. Given the current situation and the speedy climatic change, students and professors of UNal Manizales and Medellín carried out a research project in which they considered possible melting of these glaciers and therefore determine the floodable areas of the El Rosario area in Manizales.

The first humans to pluck a Caribbean fighting conch from the shallow lagoons of Panama’s Bocas del Toro were in for a good meal. Smithsonian scientists found that 7,000 years ago, this common marine shellfish contained 66 percent more meat than its descendants do today. Because of persistent harvesting of the largest conchs, it became advantageous for the animal to mature at a smaller size, resulting in evolutionary change.

UNal experts presented a model to produce a biologic compound to battle against Infectious Bovine Rhinotracheitis (IBR), a very frequently diagnosed disease in Colombian cattle. IBR is a disease caused by the Bovine herpesvirus 1, which has world-wide distribution and is responsible for respiratory and genital diseases.

Through a novel formula a group of researchers are working to boost the capability of certain microorganisms to naturally extract contaminants such as sulphur-associated coal. Although coal is the most abundant fossil fuel in the world, it is also a polluting source after its combustion as it produces adverse environmental factors due to emission of sulphur gases into the environment, especially in large-scale industrial processes.

An international group of scientists, with the participation of The Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Salamanca (IRNASA, CSIC center), has discovered a regulatory key process in certain microorganisms which produce methane, the main ingredient of natural gas. This process is similar to the one that activates photosynthesis in plants and finding it in anaerobic microorganisms is an important change for the evolutionary biology. That is the reason why this work has been published at the prestigious scientific magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).