Earth

Scientists analysing prehistoric global warming say thawing permafrost released massive amounts of carbon stored in frozen soil of Polar Regions exacerbating climate change through increasing global temperatures and ocean acidification.

Hidden in the mud, the cone snail Conus purpurascens lies in wait for its victims. It attracts its prey, fish, with its proboscis, which can move like a worm, protruding from the mud. Once a fish approaches out of curiosity, the snail will rapidly shoot a harpoon at it, which consists of an evolutionarily modified tooth. The paralyzed victim then becomes an easy meal. It takes the venomous cone snail about two weeks to digest a fish. During this time, its venomous harpoon is also replaced.

New research into the impact of climate change on Chinese cereal crops has found rainfall has a greater impact than rising temperature. The research, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture found that while maize is sensitive to warming increases in temperature from 1980 onwards correlated with both higher and lower yields of rice and wheat.

AMHERST, Mass. – The U.S. National Research Council this week released a synthesis of reports from thousands of scientists in 60 countries who took part in the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-08, the first in over 50 years to offer a benchmark for environmental conditions and new discoveries in the polar regions.

University of Massachusetts Amherst geosciences researcher and expert in the paleoclimate of the Arctic, Julie Brigham-Grette, co-chaired the NRC report, "Lessons and Legacies of the IPY 2007-08" with leading Antarctic climate scientist Robert Bindschadler of NASA.

Australian, Korean and US scientists have generated a 65-year record of Southern Hemisphere nitrous oxide measurements establishing a new benchmark against which to compare changes in the long-lived greenhouse gas that is also a major ozone-depleting substance.Published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, the record is drawn from atmospheric sampling at the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station, Tasmania, and air extracted from the Antarctic ice sheet

You are what you eat is truism that has been given new impetus by 'cutting edge' research led by the University of Leicester that reveals your teeth are literally shaped by your food.

Indeed, evidence from teeth can be used to determine what has been eaten by an animal providing a new way of working out the diets of wild animals that doesn't involve the unpleasant task of looking at the contents of their guts.

Scientists say it is also possible to use these methods to investigate diets of extinct animals such as giant marine reptiles and dinosaurs.

Boulder, Colo., USA – New Lithosphere research about Earth's crust and upper mantle presents what may be the best-documented ancient sedimentary record of subduction initiation along a continental margin in the El Paso Mountains region of California; an integrated approach to understanding the Karakoram Fault Zone, Tibet; and back-and-forth exchanges between field-based observations and lab analyses and modeling that lead researchers to 40-year-old interpretation of the geologic history of the Walker Lane belt, Nevada.

Alexandria, VA – Tornadoes are notoriously difficult to forecast, with often deadly results: In 2011, tornadoes in the U.S. killed more than 550 people, a higher death toll than in the past 10 years combined. Now a new study on short-term climate trends offers a fresh approach to tornado forecasting that may give people in tornado-prone regions more warning that twisters may soon be descending.

University of California, Berkeley, chemists have found a smoking gun proving that increased fertilizer use over the past 50 years is responsible for a dramatic rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide, which is a major greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change.

Climate scientists have assumed that the cause of the increased nitrous oxide was nitrogen-based fertilizer, which stimulates microbes in the soil to convert nitrogen to nitrous oxide at a faster rate than normal.

The Earth's crust beneath the Mississippi Delta sinks at a much slower rate than what had been assumed.

That's one of the results geoscientists report today in a paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The researchers arrived at their conclusions by comparing detailed sea-level reconstructions from different portions of coastal Louisiana.

Scientists from the University of Liverpool are working with computer modelling specialists in India to predict areas of the country that are at most risk of malaria outbreaks, following changes in monsoon rainfall.

The number of heavy rainfall events in India has increased over the past 50 years, but research has tended to focus on the impact this has on agriculture rather than the vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and Japanese Encephalitis.

How do dogs behave when their ability to exert self-control is compromised? Are they more likely to approach dangerous situations or stay well away? According to a new study by Holly Miller, from the University of Lille Nord de France, and colleagues, dogs that have 'run out' of self-control make more impulsive decisions that put them in harm's way. The work was just published online in Springer's Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

A century on from the sinking of the Titanic, science writer Richard Corfield takes a look at the cascade of events that led to the demise of the 'unsinkable' ship, taking into account the maths and physics that played a significant part.

At 11.40 p.m. on Sunday 14 April 1912 the Titanic, bound from Southampton to New York, struck an iceberg just off the coast of Newfoundland and became fully submerged within three hours, before dropping four kilometres to the bottom of the Atlantic.

A new study contrasting ocean temperature readings of the 1870s with temperatures of the modern seas reveals an upward trend of global ocean warming spanning at least 100 years.