In the furry animal world, it's the boys approaching adulthood who tend to start to wander to seek their fortune. Which usually means a mate. Girls tend to stay closer to the home range.
Permafrost covers a considerable part of the Arctic; it’s been thawing in recent decades, releasing greenhouse gases. New research reveals that similarly ancient ice wedges that form the prevalent honeycomb pattern across the tundra appear to be melting rapidly across the Arctic.
A new study quantifies the public health costs of polluted air from existing coal-fired power plants in the Western Balkans at up to 8.5 EUR billion per year.
Microbes in soil – organisms that exert enormous influence over our planet’s carbon cycle – may not be as adaptable to climate change as most scientists have presumed, according to the results of a 17-year “soil transplant” on a mountainside in eastern Washington.
How do ocean gardens get nitrogen, which is critical to producing life, and will they get it differently in the future? It’s a critical set of questions that has been stumping oceanographers and leading them on a quest for answers.
“If you live in flammable countryside, you’ve got to work with fire. You can’t make it go away,” according to professor Mark Cochrane, a wildfire expert and senior scientist at the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence. That means moving from the notion that fires are unnatural and toward a managed approach that involves reintegrating fire as a vital landscape process and building communities that are resilient to fire.
"Upside-down rivers" of warm ocean water threaten the stability of floating ice shelves in Antarctica, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center published today in Nature Geoscience. The study highlights how parts of Antarctica's ice sheet may be weakening due to contact with warm ocean water.
Rising temperatures worldwide are changing not only weather systems, but — just as importantly — the distribution of water around the globe, according to a study published today (March 14, 2016) in the journal, “Scientific Reports.”
Lake Huron's Chinook salmon fishery will likely never return to its glory days because the lake can no longer support the predatory fish's main food source, the herring-like alewife, according to a new University of Michigan-led computer-modeling study.
The American Thoracic Society applauds the collaborative effort of President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada to reduce methane emissions from the oil and natural gas sector. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to global climate change.
Alternative methods to animal testing, how epigenomic exposures impact health, safety of toxic metals in foods, effects of exposures to nanoparticles, generational effects of environmental exposures, and the toxicological effects of manmade and natural disasters are the topics of some of the more than 170 scientific sessions being conducted at the 55th Annual Meeting and ToxExpo of the Society of Toxicology (SOT), March 13–17, 2016, at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Methane and nitrous oxide emissions that result from human activity make the terrestrial biosphere, which includes all land-based ecosystems, a net contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. Agricultural, waste management and other practices have driven the transformation of the terrestrial biosphere, according to new research.
Extreme weather events like floods, heat waves and droughts can devastate communities and populations worldwide. Recent scientific advances have enabled researchers to confidently say that the increased intensity and frequency of some, but not all, of these extreme weather events is influenced by human-induced climate change, according to an international National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report released today (March 11).
Olin College professor working on proof of concept system to deploy drones into a wildfire and send back information in real time, potentially saving lives and livelihoods in the process.
A $714,000 USDA grant to MTSU will support partnership to discover novel ways of land management and solve important ecological problems in changing climates and agricultural management.
Race and ethnicity as a function of climate-change attitudes is the subject of a recent study by Jonathon Schuldt, assistant professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and collaborator Adam Pearson, assistant professor of psychology at Pomona (Calif.) College.
A technique developed by Northern Arizona University researchers can help invasive pest managers make more informed decisions about how to control Japanese beetles and the extensive damage they cause.
Stanford scientists have discovered a novel way to make plastic from carbon dioxide (CO2) and inedible plant material, such as agricultural waste and grasses. Researchers say the new technology could provide a low-carbon alternative to plastic bottles and other items currently made from petroleum.
More people live close to sea coast than earlier estimated, assess researchers in a new study. These people are the most vulnerable to the rise of the sea level as well as to the increased number of floods and intensified storms. By using recent increased resolution datasets, Aalto University researchers estimate that 1.9 billion inhabitants, or 28% of the world's total population, live closer than 100 km from the coast in areas less than 100 meters above the present sea level.
Common blight is a devastating bacterial disease. It greatly reduces the yield and quality of bean crops across the world. Conventional breeding techniques can be used to generate cultivars of common bean that are resistant to the common blight. But it remains challenging to breed cultivars of common bean that combine the desired high yield and quality with resistance to diseases.
One of the most critical questions surrounding climate change is how it might affect the food supply for a growing global population. A new study by researchers from Brown and Tufts universities suggests that researchers have been overlooking how two key human responses to climate -- how much land people choose to farm, and the number of crops they plant -- will impact food production in the future.
While many students returned from the semester break with stories of vacations taken or jobs worked, Boston College freshman Branick Weix had something unusual and inspiring to share: his weeklong trip to Costa Rica to help researchers track endangered sea turtles. Through his company, SkyLink Productions, the Minnesota native partnered with the nonprofit group Seeds of Change and used an array of drones to help researchers study nesting turtles on a remote peninsula of the Central American country.
Food scientists at Mississippi State University and a Kansas State University entomologist have developed coatings that protect age-cured hams from mites, reducing the need for a previous treatment that is harmful to the ozone layer.
Heavy city traffic contributes significantly to air pollution and health problems such as asthma, but University of Texas at Dallas researchers think another kind of traffic — data traffic — might help citizens better cope with pollution.
Identifying Corrective Actions from Agricultural Response, or ICAAR, is a new tool being developed by Kansas State University's National Agricultural Biosecurity Center to help with agricultural emergency management.
University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researchers are studying how to preserve pollinators and wildflowers along the state’s roadsides. The best-known pollinators are bees, but UF/IFAS researchers are studying butterflies as roadside pollinators. Among their other benefits, butterflies serve as indicator organisms. Florida Department of Transportation officials supported UF scientists in the study and appreciate the results because they want to create an environment that fosters biodiversity and conserves critical ecosystem services like pollination.
Arundo donax, a giant reed that grows in the Mediterranean climate zones of the world, isn't like other prolific warm-weather grasses, researchers report. This grass, which can grow annually to 6 meters (nearly 20 feet) in height, uses a type of photosynthesis that is more common to crop plants like soybeans, rice and peanuts.
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.
New light has been shed on the processes by which ocean water enters the solid Earth during continental breakup. Research led by geoscientists at the University of Southampton, and published in Nature Geoscience this week, is the first to show a direct link on geological timescales between fault activity and the amount of water entering the Earth’s mantle along faults.
The world’s fisheries are a great source of protein, but even with the best management, they won’t be able to meet the needs of a global population expected to exceed nine billion by 2050, a University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences resource economics expert said. Therefore, aquaculture must grow, said James Anderson, a UF/IFAS food and resource economics professor and director of the UF/IFAS Institute for Sustainable Food Systems.
Neil Sturchio, professor and chair of UD’s Department of Geological Sciences, is exploring how the thawing of permafrost, a subsurface layer of soil that remains mostly frozen throughout the year, affects vegetation and the carbon cycle in the Toolik Lake area of the Alaska’s North Slope.
'Four-Flavored' Tetraquark, Planets Born Like Cracking Paint, New 2D Materials, The World's Newest Atom-Smasher in the Physics News Source sponsored by AIP.
Clouds are notoriously hard to simulate in computer programs that model climate. A new study in the Proceedings on the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition suggests why -- either clouds are more variable than scientists give them credit for, or those bright white clouds in the sky are much dirtier than scientists thought.
An El Niño winter which brought record rainfall in January has been threatening the ecological health of the St. Lucie River in southeast Florida. Ongoing discharges from Lake Okeechobee are damaging the delicate balance of freshwater and saltwater in surrounding estuaries.
With support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have embarked on an ambitious plane-based survey to gauge the influence of humans and their livestock on the largest remaining forests in Central America.
At Argonne National Laboratory, two scientists work on simulations that project what the climate will look like 100 years from now. Last year, they completed the highest-resolution climate forecast ever done for North America, dividing the continent into squares just over seven miles on a side—far more detailed than the standard 30 to 60 miles.
As strategies for energy security, investment opportunities and energy policies prompt ever-growing production and consumption of biofuels like bioethanol and biodiesel, land and water that could otherwise be used for food production increasingly are used to produce crops for fuel.
Healthy rains in the fall and early winter put Texas on track for a spectacular 2016 spring wildflower season, according to a Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center expert, but spotty rain and unusual warmth recently could dampen displays in some areas.
Josh Reno, assistant professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, spent a year working as a paper picker at a large mega-landfill on the outskirts of Detroit, M.I., to explore the relationship North Americans have with garbage. His two big takeaways: a) People don’t think twice about what happens to the garbage they throw out and b) the American dream of two cars, a house and perfect commodities is made possible by creating tons of waste. Reno delivers the nitty-gritty details of his job and the impact of waste management on society in Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill, a new book published by the University of California Press.