Earth

When President Barack Obama visited the shrinking Exit Glacier in September, he pointed to a very obvious sign of our warming planet literally at his feet.

Less visible, but perhaps more indelible, signs of changing climate lie in the oceans. A University of Washington researcher argues in the journal Science that people -- including the world leaders who will gather later this month in Paris for the latest round of climate change negotiations -- should pay more attention to how climate change's impacts on ocean and coastal environments affect societies around the globe.

Historically when El Niño events occur, Hawai'i has experienced nearly six months of drought, from November to April. Conversely, during La Niña events rainfall has been greater than normal - building up Hawai'i's groundwater supply.

On November 12 at 4 a.m. EST the National Hurricane Center issued the last advisory on Extra-Tropical Cyclone Kate, located several hundred miles south-southeast of Cape Race, Newfoundland. NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured a visible light image of the storm.

WASHINGTON, DC -- Continued deforestation of the Amazon rainforest could diminish the amount of rain that falls in the Amazon River basin, finds a new study. These declines in rainfall could potentially alter the region's climate, disrupting rainforest ecosystems and impacting local economies, according to the study's authors.

PENSACOLA, Fla. - An increasing amount of drugs taken by humans and animals make it into our streams and waterways, and pharmaceutical pollution has had catastrophic ecosystem consequences despite low levels of concentration in the environment. The effect of pharmaceuticals and other contaminants of emerging concern on the environment will be addressed in a special issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (ET&C). Much progress has been made in the recent years on the topic and this special issue will illustrate the state of the science.

RALEIGH, NC - Currently, the carbon sequestered in U.S. forests partially offsets the nation's carbon emissions and reduces the overall costs of achieving emission targets to address climate change - but that could change over the next 25 years.

The accumulation of carbon stored in U.S. forests may slow in the future, primarily due to land use change and forest aging - with the rate widely varying among regions - according to findings by U.S. Forest Service scientists published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

The hunting ability and growth of sharks will be dramatically impacted by increased CO2 levels and warmer oceans expected by the end of the century, a University of Adelaide study has found.

Published today in the journal Scientific Reports, marine ecologists from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute report long-term experiments that show warmer waters and ocean acidification will have major detrimental effects on sharks' ability to meet their energy demands, with the effects likely to cascade through entire ecosystems.

12.11.2015: Our planet Earth is the only planet in the Solar System that possesses Plate Tectonics. The Earth's surface is in a constant state of change; the tectonic plates together with the oceans and continents continuously slide along one another, collide or sink into the Earth's mantle. However, it still remains unclear how Plate Tectonics started on Earth.

New research indicates that cockroaches use a combination of fast and slow twitch muscle fibers to give their mandibles a 'force boost' that allows them to chew through tough materials.

The study, published today in PLOS ONE, shows that cockroaches activate slow twitch muscle fibres only when chewing on tough material such as wood that requires repetitive, hard biting to generate a bite force 50 times stronger than their own body weight.

A shot of icy chemical cocktail - that's the promising solution to controlling hot plasmas in fusion devices, researchers say.

Recent experiments conducted at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics (GA) show promise in an innovative approach to controlling unwanted hot spots inside the devices, called tokamaks, which contain energy-producing fusion plasma at temperatures hotter than the Sun's core.

Meet "Super H mode," a newly discovered state of tokamak plasma that could sharply boost the performance of future fusion reactors. This new state raises the pressure at the edge of the plasma beyond what previously had been thought possible, creating the potential to increase the power production of the superhot core of the plasma.

Humans have been exploiting bees as far back as the Stone Age, according to new research from the University of Bristol published in Nature today.

Previous evidence from prehistoric rock art is inferred to show honey hunters and Pharaonic Egyptian murals show early scenes of beekeeping. However, the close association between early farmers and the honeybee remained uncertain.

Scientists at Queen's University Belfast have made a major breakthrough by making a porous liquid - with the potential for a massive range of new technologies including 'carbon capture'.

Researchers in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen's, along with colleagues at the University of Liverpool and other, international partners, have invented the new liquid and found that it can dissolve unusually large amounts of gas, which are absorbed into the 'holes' in the liquid. The results of their research are published today in the journal Nature.

Embargo: 11. November 2015, 1800 London time / 1300 US Eastern Time /1900 CET

"Knowing what a chicken looks like and what all the chickens before it looked like doesn't help us to understand the egg," says Taras Gerya. The ETH Professor of Geophysics uses this metaphor to address plate tectonics and the early history of the Earth. The Earth's lithosphere is divided into several plates that are in constant motion, and today's geologists have a good understanding of what drives these plate movements: heavier ocean plates are submerged beneath lighter continental plates along what are known as subduction zones.