Earth

People often think hippos are herbivores with big smiling faces. Every now and then, reports of a hippo of hunting down prey, eating a carcass, or stealing prey from a crocodile are heard, but they're typically considered 'aberrant' or 'unusual' behaviour.

The maple syrup that's tapped from the tree may not be as fresh as you think it is.

Sugar maple trees can store carbon from the atmosphere for several years in non-structural reserves as a buffer against disturbances such as droughts, hurricane damage, or attacks by insects. A new study shows that trees draw on this reserve when springtime sap begins to flow.

Thus, the sweet sap of maple trees integrates sugars produced during several growing seasons. The findings may provide new insights on how trees store and regulate the availability of nutrients.

Researchers at Umeå University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have discovered that increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have shifted photosynthetic metabolism in plants over the 20th century. This is the first study worldwide that deduces biochemical regulation of plant metabolism from historical specimens. The findings are now published in the leading journal PNAS and will have an impact on new models of future CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

• Researchers find two distinct motions in sperm
• Unless they crane their necks all sperm would only turn left
• University of Warwick researchers say this could mean two distinct sperm subpopulations
• Discovery could improve IVF and fertility treatments.

Spermatozoa need to crane their necks to turn right to counteract a left-turning drive caused by the rotation of their tails, new research has found.

PRINCETON, N.J--People often believe that future generations will be better off than their predecessors, but that may be a dangerous assumption when it comes to climate change, according to new Princeton research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The warming effects of climate change usually conjure up ideas of parched and barren landscapes broiling in a blazing sun, its heat amplified by greenhouse gases. But a study led by Princeton University researchers suggests that hotter nights may actually wield much greater influence over the planet's atmosphere as global temperatures rise -- and could eventually lead to more carbon flooding the atmosphere.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Including plants' acclimation to changes in temperature could significantly improve the accuracy of climate models, a Purdue University study shows.

Plants are the largest drivers of carbon fluxes between land and the atmosphere, taking up and releasing carbon dioxide through the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. The rates at which these processes occur are sensitive to temperature and gradually adjust over time in response to long-term temperature shifts, a phenomenon known as acclimation.

HOUSTON - (Dec. 7, 2015) - Never mind the ABCs. Rice University scientists interested in nanotubes are studying their XYΩs.

Carbon nanotubes grown in a furnace aren't always straight. Sometimes they curve and kink, and sometimes they branch off in several directions. The Rice researchers realized they now had the tools available to examine just how tough those branches are.

Because plants need carbon dioxide to grow, scientists have expected rising atmospheric CO2 to substantially enhance plant growth, offsetting a portion of human CO2 emissions and, in turn, slowing climate change. However, new research from the Institute on the Environment published today in Nature Climate Change adds to a growing body of research challenging this expectation.

Julian Steinwachs and colleagues at the Biophysics Group investigated tumour cell migration in artificial connective tissue made of collagen, which mimics the natural matrix of organs in terms of its chemical composition, structure and other material properties. The idea behind their method is simple: the researchers first measured the deformation of the connective tissue around the migrating cells. If the elasticity of the connective tissue is known, it can then be used like a spring scale to calculate the cell forces from the tissue deformations.

04.12.2015: Continental transform faults evolve when two plates slide along each other. The most prominent examples are the San Andreas Fault in California and the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey. Earthquakes along those faults typically do not exceed earthquake magnitudes around M8 but occur at shallow depth thus posing a major threat to nearby metropolitan regions such as San Francisco or Istanbul.

An algorithm inspired by a popular song-matching app is helping Stanford scientists find previously overlooked earthquakes in large databases of ground motion measurements.

They call their algorithm Fingerprint And Similarity Thresholding, or FAST, and it could transform how seismologists detect microquakes - temblors that don't pack enough punch to register as earthquakes when analyzed by conventional methods. While microquakes don't threaten buildings or people, monitoring them could help scientists predict how frequently, and where, larger quakes are likely to occur.

Boulder, Colo., USA - U.S. Geological Survey scientists used 3D laser scanning to make repeat measurements of an area affected by the 2014 magnitude 6.0 South Napa earthquake in order to define in great detail the surface deformation that occurred both during and after the earthquake. The recent revolution in 3D laser measurement technology (LiDAR) allows scientists to collect detailed information about the shape of the land surface and the objects that sit upon it with unprecedented accuracy.

By examining rocks at the bottom of ancient oceans, an international group of researchers have revealed that arsenic concentrations in the oceans have varied greatly over time. But also that in the very early oceans, arsenic co-varied with the rise of atmospheric oxygen and coincided with the coming and going of global glaciations. The study was recently published in the Nature Group Journal, Scientific Reports.

Are all scientists atheists? Do they believe religion and science can co-exist? These questions and others were addressed in the first worldwide survey of how scientists view religion, released today by researchers at Rice University.