Scientists have discovered extensive, ancient deep-sea coral reefs within the Galápagos Marine Reserve (GMR) – the first of their kind ever to be documented inside the marine protected area (MPA) since it was established in 1998.
Artificial intelligence’s rapid growth has led to advancements like autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, and ChatGPT. But AI technologies and the training of AI models require a lot of energy, increasing concerns about the environmental impact of AI and its sustainability. To put AI’s energy usage into perspective: it took nine days to train one of OpenAI’s early model chatbots known as MegatronLM.
Research led by UC San Diego and Harvard has traced the evolutionary adaptations of octopus and squid sensing capabilities. The researchers describe for the first time the structure of an octopus chemotactile receptor, which octopus arms use for taste-by-touch exploration of the seafloor.
A new analysis of the carbon footprint of products used in the five most common surgical operations carried out in the NHS in England shows that 68% of carbon contributions come from single-use items, such as single-use gowns, patient drapes and instrument table drapes.
The 2022 eruption of a submarine volcano in Tonga was more powerful than the largest U.S. nuclear explosion, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science and the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation.
A study conducted at the Santa Bárbara Ecological Station, an environmental protection unit in São Paulo state, investigated how much bark is produced by savanna and forest species in the Cerrado, whether savanna species that produce more bark also protect their gemmae more effectively, and whether generalist species (occurring in both savanna and forest) produce different amounts of bark depending on the environment in which they grow.
Killer whales (also known as orcas) are intelligent predators. While it’s known that killer whales in the Pacific Northwest exploit widely different food types, even within the same region, we know much less about the feeding habits of those found throughout the North Atlantic.
The alnus ambrosia beetle Xylosandrus germanus, also known as the black stem borer, was accidentally introduced by humans from its native east Asia to North America and Europe around the beginning of the 20th century.
The demand for precious metals and rare earths is expected to continue increasing in the future. Due to limited production areas, recycling from precision equipment and recovering from seawater and hot spring water are needed to ensure a stable supply.
Scientists have traced the origin of a unique protein key to vertebrate’s camera-like vision back 500 million years. Their analysis of more than 900 genomes across the tree of life revealed that the protein came through horizontal gene transfer from foreign bacterial genes.
Scientists have described a new species of bat based on the oldest bat skeletons ever recovered. The study on the extinct bat, which lived in Wyoming about 52 million years ago, supports the idea that bats diversified rapidly on multiple continents during this time.
Until recently, fish that eat coral — corallivores — were thought to weaken reef structures, while fish that consume algae and detritus — grazers — were thought to keep reefs healthy.
A new look at climate data shows that, by the end of the century, the heaviest days of rain and snowfall across much of North America will likely release 20 to 30 percent more moisture than they do now. Much of the increased precipitation will occur in winter, potentially exacerbating flooding in regions such as the upper Midwest and the west coast. Researchers also found that heavy precipitation days historically experienced once in a century will become more frequent – as often as once every 30 or 40 years in the Pacific Northwest and southeastern United States.
A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, provides interesting new evidence about the evolution of North American wolves, which has been a subject of debate among conservationists and taxonomists.
A University of Adelaide-led study will investigate if mixing a variety of compounds, including biserrula, into cow feed that contains seaweed, can reduce the amount of methane produced by livestock.
Barath Raghavan, an associate professor of computer science at USC Viterbi, is rethinking traditional farming practices by developing computational tools to help farmers design, develop, and manage sustainable farming methods.
A researcher at the University of Kentucky is helping solve a mystery on the coast of North Carolina: Where did coal found on the shipwrecked Queen Anne’s Revenge come from? About 300 years ago, a band of pirates captured a French slave ship. Among those pirates was a man named Edward Thatch (also spelled as Teach) who would be better known as Blackbeard.
Many birds’ feathers are remarkably efficient at shedding water — so much so that “like water off a duck’s back” is a common expression.
Since the 1950s, humanity has produced an estimated 8.3bn tons of plastic, adding a further 380m tons to this amount each year. Only 9% of this gets recycled.
Rutgers geneticists, working with an international team of scientists, have conducted the most comprehensive sequencing yet of the complete DNA sequence of the little skate – which, like its better-known cousin, the stingray, has long been viewed as enigmatic because of its shape. The scientists, writing in Nature, reported that by studying the intricacies of Leucoraja erinacea’s genome, they have gained a far better understanding of how the fish evolved from its ancestor – which possessed a much narrower body – over a period of 300 million years to become a flat, winged bottom-dweller.
How and where life began 3.5 billion years ago is still a mystery, but there are two things of which scientists are almost certain. First, for much of that time, life on Earth was almost exclusively microbial. Second, there must have been prebiotic precursor compounds such as amino acids, organic acids, and lipids available to jumpstart the formation of DNA, enzymes, and cell walls, and to set life on a path leading to the complex forms we see today.
The five members of the Coalition for Plant-Based Foods in Hospitals have produced videos showing the free resources each member offers.
Natural gas supplies 32% of all primary energy in the United States, its share of electricity generation having nearly doubled from 2008 to 2021. The cross-country natural gas pipeline system used to be powered mainly by natural gas, but recently has switched in places to electric power.
The disastrous flood that hit Durban in April 2022 was the most catastrophic natural disaster yet recorded in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in collective terms of lives lost, homes and infrastructure damaged or destroyed and economic impact.
The SLAC-Stanford team pulled hydrogen directly from ocean waters. Their work could help efforts to generate low-carbon fuel for electric grids, cars, boats and other infrastructure.
A new study led by scientists from the Chinese MARA-CABI Joint Laboratory for Biosafety suggests greater awareness of biopesticide market availability, efficacy and field application processes could help tackle locust outbreaks in China.
In Applied Physics Letters, researchers in the U.K. introduce a novel imaging method to detect gold nanoparticles in woodlice. Their method, known as four-wave mixing microscopy, flashes light that the gold nanoparticles absorb. The light flashes again and the subsequent scattering reveals the nanoparticles’ locations. With information about the quantity, location, and impact of gold nanoparticles within the organism, scientists can better understand the potential harm other metals may have on nature.
New research lead by Keith Slotkin, PhD, member, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center opens the door for scientists to equip plants with the tools they need to adapt to rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), high heat, and other stressors associated with climate change.
A new study demonstrates that birds can partially compensate for these changes by delaying the start of spring migration and completing the journey faster. But the strategy comes with a cost—a decline in overall survival.
Insights into gene and protein control systems that regulate the use of nitrogen by plant roots could help develop crops that require less nitrogenous fertilizers to produce acceptable yields. Plant biochemist Soichi Kojima and colleagues at Tohoku University discuss their findings and future plans in an article in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.
Mention fungi, and most people will probably think of the mushrooms they pick in fall, or maybe the yeast they add when baking or making wine. Others will perhaps recall last week’s mouldy bread – or cucumbers gone bad in the refrigerator. Indeed, mycologists have studied these fungi as sources of food and fermentation but also decay and disease for centuries.
To better understand which factor has the greatest impact on the concentration of dissolved oxygen, researchers at Penn State used a deep learning model to analyze data from hundreds of rivers across the United States.
Semislugs, or ‘snugs’ as they are affectionately known among mollusc researchers, are like the squatters of the snail world: they do carry a home on their back but it is too small to live in. Still, it offers a sort of protection, while not getting in the way of the worm-like physique of the slug.
Three engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have invented a fabric that concludes the 80-year quest to make a synthetic textile modeled on Polar bear fur.
Elephants like to eat bananas, but they don’t usually peel them first in the way humans do. A new report in the journal Current Biology on April 10, however, shows that one very special Asian elephant named Pang Pha picked up banana peeling all on her own while living at the Berlin Zoo.
Plants are capable of responding to people and have behaviors comparable to tameness, according to authors of new research that calls for a reappraisal of the process of plant domestication, based on almost a decade of observations and experiments.
New research finds that global warming will bring stronger and more frequent hurricanes to U.S. coasts, up by a third compared to current levels.
A team of air-quality researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) expects to receive vital data from a new NASA instrument launched into space on Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket toward its host geostationary satellite, Intelsat 40e, on Friday, April 7.The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) is the first spectrometer instrument that will collect hourly daytime observations of major air pollutants over greater North America, revolutionizing scientific capabilities to monitor air quality.
A team of researchers compared the genomes of woolly mammoths with modern day elephants to find out what made woolly mammoths unique, both as individuals and as a species. The investigators report April 7 in the journal Current Biology that many of the woolly mammoth’s trademark features—including their woolly coats and large fat deposits—were already genetically encoded in the earliest woolly mammoths, but these and other traits became more defined over the species’ 700,000+ year existence.
Human activities emit many kinds of pollutants into the air, and without a molecule called hydroxide (OH), many of these pollutants would keep aggregating in the atmosphere. How OH itself forms in the atmosphere was viewed as a complete story, but in new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team that includes Sergey Nizkorodov, a University of California, Irvine professor of chemistry, report that a strong electric field that exists at the surface between airborne water droplets and the surrounding air can create OH by a previously unknown mechanism.
Focused on the accuracy of climate predictions, a computational team led by Sandia National Laboratories recently achieved a major milestone with a cloud-resolving model they ran on Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer.
At least five ice ages have befallen Earth, including one 635 million years ago that created glaciers from pole to pole.
The Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI) is a sustainable development and economic progress metric that transcends the conventional means of measuring a nation’s prosperity.
Climate change might compromise how permanently forests are able to store carbon and keep it out of the air. In a new study, researchers found that the regions most at risk to lose forest carbon through fire, climate stress or insect damage are those regions where many forest carbon offset projects have been set up. The authors assert that there's an urgent need to update these carbon offsets protocols and policies.
Argonne is partnering with Brookhaven National Laboratory and University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras to engage students who are largely underrepresented in the atmospheric and Earth system sciences workforce.
Natural disasters can devastate a region, abruptly killing the species that form an ecosystem’s structure. But how this transpires can influence recovery. While fires scorch the landscape to the ground, a heatwave leaves an army of wooden staves in its wake. Storm surges and coral bleaching do something similar underwater.
Seismic arrays deployed in California’s Long Beach and Seal Beach areas detected more than a thousand tiny earthquakes over eight months, many of them located at surprisingly shallow depths of less than two kilometers below the surface.
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