Scientists recreated deep sea conditions from the last ice age and found that the tropical Pacific contained more carbon and less oxygen during that period than previously thought.
A new collaborative study has investigated Arctic shrub-snow interactions to obtain a better understanding of the far north's tundra and vast permafrost system. Incorporating extensive in situ observations, Los Alamos National ...
When Australian scientists presented evidence in 2016 of life on Earth 3.7 billon years ago—pushing the record back 220 million years—it was a big deal, influencing even the search for life on Mars.
New research from North Carolina State University and the University of Copenhagen finds that more bacterioplankton utilize vitamin B1 or B1 precursors from their environment than synthesize their own. The researchers also ...
The Beaufort Gyre is an enormous, 600-mile-wide pool of swirling cold, fresh water in the Arctic Ocean, just north of Alaska and Canada. In the winter, this current is covered by a thick cap of ice. Each summer, as the ice ...
Flash drought is a rapidly intensifying water deficit process accompanied by high temperatures in a short period of time. Recently, heat extremes have become more frequent in a warming climate, and have substantially increased ...
Scientists say there is not yet enough evidence to conclude that microplastics do or do not cause harm to the environment, following a review of more than 300 global studies.
An international team of earth scientists has linked the establishment of the Mekong River to a period of major intensification of the Asian monsoon during the middle Miocene, about 17 million years ago, findings that supplant ...
Winds blowing across snow dunes on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf cause the massive ice slab's surface to vibrate, producing a near-constant set of seismic "tones" scientists could potentially use to monitor changes in the ice ...
From Venice and the tower of Pisa to the medieval city of Rhodes, dozens of UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Mediterranean basin are deeply threatened by rising sea levels, researchers warned Tuesday.
Early life forms on Earth may have been able to generate metabolic energy from sunlight using a purple-pigmented molecule called retinal that possibly predates the evolution of chlorophyll and photosynthesis. If retinal has ...
IIASA and the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC) have made the scenarios underlying last week's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1.5°C Special Report publicly available in an interactive online ...
Climatologists may be unable to accurately predict regional climate change over the North Atlantic because computer model simulations have failed to accurately include air pressure changes that have taken place in the Greenland ...
Working with high-resolution satellite imaging technology, researchers from Brown University and the University of California, Los Angeles have uncovered new clues in an age-old question about why tropical forests are so ...
Phytoplankton blooms that form the base of the marine food web are expanding northward into ice-free waters where they have never been seen before, according to new research.
While temperatures in the tropical forests of northeastern Puerto Rico have climbed two degrees Celsius since the mid-1970s, the biomass of arthropods—invertebrate animals such as insects, millipedes, and sowbugs—has ...
Adopting benchmarks similar to the fuel-efficiency standards used by the auto industry in the production of fertilizer could yield $5-8 billion in economic benefits for the U.S. corn sector alone, researchers have concluded ...
Adopting a more local and flexible approach to sustainable development could be key to boosting the productivity of small-scale chicken farms in Africa, a new study reports.
A study of 3,588 square kilometers of privately owned land in central Kenya offers evidence that humans and their livestock can, in the right circumstances, share territory with zebras, giraffes, elephants and other wild ...
For the first time, scientists have traced the north-south shifts of the northern-most edge of the tropics back 800 years, reports a University of Arizona-led international team.
Stanford scientists have revealed the presence of water stored within a glacier in Greenland, where the rapidly changing ice sheet is a major contributor to the sea-level rise North America will experience in the next 100 ...
The Arctic Ocean's blanket of sea ice has changed since 1958 from predominantly older, thicker ice to mostly younger, thinner ice, according to new research published by NASA scientist Ron Kwok of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ...
Shelled marine creatures living in increasingly acidified oceans face a fight for survival as the impacts of climate change spread, a new study suggests.
The loud crack rang out from the fog above the Baishui No. 1 Glacier as a stone shard careened down the ice, flying past Chen Yanjun as he operated a GPS device.
Harpal Singh struck a match and watched his fields burn, the acrid smoke drifting toward New Delhi where a lethal smog cocktail is once again intensifying over the world's most polluted megacity.
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump's administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court stop a novel and sweeping lawsuit pressed by children and teenagers seeking to force the federal government to take steps against climate change.
Virtually everything most people on earth do these days involves, either directly or indirectly, the combustion of oil, gas and coal. Burning these fossil fuels is generating carbon emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere, ...
Air pollution in the U.S. has decreased since about 1990, and a new study conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill now shows that this air quality improvement has brought substantial public health benefits. ...
Months of drought have left water levels on Germany's Rhine river at a record low, exposing a World War II bomb and forcing ship operators to halt services to prevent vessels from running aground.
In the Canadian Arctic, a mystery has troubled scientists and local communities for decades: Why do marine animals in the western Arctic have higher mercury levels than those in the east?
The Galapagos archipelago is one of the most famous groups of islands in the world. Many of the animal and plant species are unique because of the islands' isolated location in the Pacific, 1,000 kilometers off of the coast ...
For an atmospheric system, there exists a limit to how far ahead one can make predictions. This is referred to as atmospheric predictability. Within this limit, however, the weather forecast will still contain some uncertainty. ...
For more than 15 years, the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to clean up its deadly air pollution, focusing intensely on reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide from coal-burning power plants.
Energy sector carbon emissions will rise in 2018 after hitting record levels the year before, dimming prospects for meeting Paris climate treaty goals, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Wednesday.
Japan said Thursday it was facing a growing sea of plastic waste with limited capacity to process it after China stopped accepting foreign waste imports.
Governments across the U.S. and Canada have made strides in their food systems planning efforts, with many recognizing within the past decade that the issue of food insecurity is just as important as maintaining other public ...
I bought some new socks this week. So what, you might ask. My new socks are lovely and warm and very fluffy – just right for autumn. But, when I wore them, they moulted their fluff all over my feet, and if I'm not careful ...
Are we restoring the Everglades just so the ocean can swallow a lot of it back up? Eighteen years into the multibillion-dollar restoration of the Everglades, a scientific review committee called Wednesday for a broad re-examination ...
The discovery of a rare mineral (reidite) at the Woodleigh meteorite impact structure in Western Australia was published this week by Curtin University honours student Morgan Cox and colleagues.
Many semiconductor fabricators and research labs are under increasing pressure from, of all things, vacuum. These facilities need to remove greater amounts of gas molecules and particles from their setups as new technologies ...
When designing flying vehicles, there are many aspects of which we can be certain but there are also many uncertainties. Most are random, and others are just not well understood. University of Illinois Professor Harry Hilton ...
Magnetic forces ripple throughout the universe, from the fields surrounding planets to the gasses filling galaxies, and can be launched by a phenomenon called the Biermann battery effect. Now scientists at the U.S. Department ...
China is planning to launch its own 'artificial moon' by 2020 to replace streetlamps and lower electricity costs in urban areas, state media reported Friday.
A trio of economists is suggesting that it is time to add a well-being index to national economic measures. Carol Graham with the Brookings Institution, Kate Laffan with the London School of Economics and Sergio Pinto with ...
Almost all galaxy clusters experience mergers. While a merger takes place, a specific spiral pattern can often be observed in X-ray images. Such a spiral feature is due to the motion of the sloshing gas induced by a merger. ...
A pair of researchers, one with the University of Bonn, the other the University of California, has found evidence that shows gender preferences differ more in countries that are more affluent and gender equal than in countries ...
Climate change is in full swing and will continue unabated as long as CO2 emissions continue. One possible solution is to return CO2 to the energy cycle: CO2 could be processed with water into methanol, a fuel that can be ...
A research group at the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), has published an article in Science describing a new method to convert inexpensive polycrystalline metal ...
Researchers from the University of Luxembourg, Technische Universität Berlin, and the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society have combined machine learning and quantum mechanics to predict the dynamics and atomic ...
Most of us would acknowledge that family members often resemble one another, particularly in the face. Indeed, humans are good at picking out pairs of close relatives amongst the faces of unfamiliar adults. We are also more ...
A newly discovered toxin that some bacteria deploy to fend off competing bacteria stands out from others in the battle for microbial domination. While many deadly substances have been identified among bacteria, this previously ...
What do watermelons and bacteria have in common? Just like the tasty fruit, microbes can be molded into unusual shapes, a study in Nature Communications has shown. The paper, produced by researchers at the Okinawa Institute ...
The ability to translate the genetic code into proteins is an essential step in all living organisms. A cornerstone of this molecular process is the ability of transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules to couple recognition of the genetic ...
Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine in collaboration with researchers at Oregon Health & Science University have resolved the three-dimensional molecular structure of the protein that's defective in people with cystic ...
Chlorophyll is the pigment used by all plants for photosynthesis. There are two versions, chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b. These are structurally very similar to one another but have different colors, blue-green and yellowish ...
Scientists studying a valuable, but vulnerable, species of poplar have identified the genetic mechanism responsible for the species' inability to resist a pervasive and deadly disease. Their finding, published in the Proceedings ...
The word "HAZMAT" describes substances that pose a risk to the environment, or even to life itself. Imagine the term being applied to entire planets, where violent flares from the host star may make worlds uninhabitable by ...
Pioneering research has given a fascinating fresh insight into how animal nervous systems evolved from simple structures to become the complex network transmitting signals between different parts of the body.
Inside smartphones and computer displays are metals known as the rare earths. Mining and purifying these metals involves waste- and energy-intense processes. Better processes are needed. Previous work has shown that specific ...
A team of scientists led by Professor Richard Layfield at the University of Sussex has published breakthrough research in molecule-based magnetic information storage materials.
A two-year cycle in the gamma-ray brightness of a blazar, a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole, has been confirmed by 10 years of observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The findings were announced ...
New observations by two Arizona State University astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have caught a red dwarf star in a violent outburst, or superflare. The blast of radiation was more powerful than any such outburst ...
A new paper written by academics at Royal Holloway and George Washington University, predicts reliable patterns in violent events occurring within wars and terrorism, regardless of geography, ethnicity and religion.
An international team of researchers has successfully produced a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in space for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes creating a small experimental ...
Those pesky bees that come buzzing around on a muggy summer day are helping researchers reveal the genes responsible for social behaviors. A new study published this week found that the social lives of sweat bees—named ...
Measuring the properties of superconducting materials in magnetic fields at close to absolute zero temperatures is difficult, but necessary to understand their quantum properties. How cold? Lower than 0.05 Kelvin (-272°C).
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has come up with a new type of cermet that could prove especially useful as a heat exchanger in solar power plants. In their paper published in the journal ...
The embryonic stem cells that form facial features, called neural crest cells, use an unexpected mechanism of moving from the back of the head to the front to populate the face, finds a new UCL-led study.
Researchers at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea have made a major scientific breakthrough by detecting the nuclear magnetism, or "nuclear spin" of a single ...
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