Decomposers are crucial for keeping Earth habitable, breaking down dead biomass and returning key nutrients, such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, to the ecosystem. Most decomposers, including fungi, survive through osmotrophy—a ...
An international team of scientists has discovered that plants are not responding to global warming in the way researchers long assumed. Scientists have expected that ecosystems would keep pace with warming by raising the ...
The weather on Earth can get pretty messy sometimes. But in space, it can be wild, and the effects can be far-reaching. Solar flares, giant explosions on the sun, can send out streams of energy that block radio communications ...
By studying life deep inside a former gold mine, a Northwestern University-led team of scientists has uncovered evidence that Earth's hidden biosphere operates less like a random collection of microbes and more like an organized ...
Four-and-a-half billion years ago, a massive world—possibly as big as the moon or even Mars—orbited our sun before crashing into another celestial body and shattering into rubble. Now, in a paper published in the journal ...
A new raptor-like dinosaur from some 70 million years ago that ate fish and behaved like modern herons has been unearthed from southern Patagonia. The new species, which has been named Kank australis, was identified based ...
Mars holds a special place in the solar system. It represents marginal habitability. This means it transitioned from warm and wet and potentially hospitable, to cold and dry and inhospitable.
On May 21, ground controllers powered down NASA's AWE (Atmospheric Waves Experiment) instrument, bringing the data collection phase of the mission to a successful and scheduled end, surpassing its planned two-year mission.
For decades, environmental debates have been framed around a stark trade-off: economic growth lifts people out of poverty but comes at the expense of forests, wildlife, and climate stability. More people and richer diets ...
The sight of a saltwater crocodile basking on a mudbank is one of the most iconic and intimidating images of northern Australia. Yet the crocodiles that inhabit the region today are just the survivors of a much richer and ...
