Earth

When you mention rich ecosystems that are vital for life on Earth, people tend to think of rainforests, but ocean plankton are actually just as crucial. The microscopic beings that drift on the upper layer of the oceans are globally referred to as "plankton"; together they produce half of our oxygen, act as carbon sinks, influence our weather, and serve as the base of the ocean food web that sustains the larger fish and marine mammals that we depend upon or draw delight from.

Shelikof Strait, in the Gulf of Alaska, is an important spawning area for walleye pollock, the target of the largest--and one of the most valuable--fisheries in the nation. This year, a team of NOAA Fisheries scientists went there to turn their usual view of the fishery upside-down.

The use of personalized music playlists with tempo-pace synchronization increases adherence to cardiac rehab by almost 70 per cent--according to a study published in Sports Medicine -Open.

"Cardiac rehab has been proven to improve long-term survival for someone who's had a heart event by 20 per cent," said Dr. David Alter, Senior Scientist, Toronto Rehab, University Health Network, and Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences. "Our challenge is there is a high drop-out rate for these programs and suboptimal adherence to the self-management of physical activity."

Bacteria resistant to antibiotics are on the rise. There are different explanations for how resistances are transferred. Researchers from the Vetmeduni Vienna found phages in chicken meat that are able to transfer antimicrobial resistance to bacteria. Phages are viruses that exclusively infect bacteria. They can contribute to the spread of antimicrobial resistance. The findings may also be relevant for clinical settings. The study was published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Computer simulations have predicted a new phase of matter: atomically thin two-dimensional liquid.

This prediction pushes the boundaries of possible phases of materials further than ever before. Two-dimensional materials themselves were considered impossible until the discovery of graphene around ten years ago. However, they have been observed only in the solid phase, because the thermal atomic motion required for molten materials easily breaks the thin and fragile membrane. Therefore, the possible existence of an atomically thin flat liquid was considered impossible.

A new study from North Carolina State University and Clemson University finds the toxin in a widely used genetically modified (GM) crop is having little impact on the crop pest corn earworm (Helicoverpa zea) - which is consistent with predictions made almost 20 years ago that were largely ignored. The study may be a signal to pay closer attention to warning signs about the development of resistance in agricultural pests to GM crops.

Water behaves in mysterious ways. Especially below zero, where it is dubbed supercooled water, before it turns into ice. Physicists have recently observed the spontaneous first steps of the ice formation process, as tiny crystal clusters as small as 15 molecules start to exhibit the recognisable structural pattern of crystalline ice. This is part of a new study, which shows that liquid water does not become completely unstable as it becomes supercooled, prior to turning into ice crystals.

The temperature balance on Earth may be dependent on a conspicuous creation that sours life for everyone around, guzzles more than a sponge and produces lots of offspring that behave likewise. And you thought your neighbors were bad.

“No plant genus is more important as a carbon balance on Earth than peat mosses. Peat stores at least a third of all the carbon on land,” says Professor Hans K. Stenøien at the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim, Norway.

Toxins known as perfluoroalkyl substances have become virtually ubiquitous throughout the environment, and various national and international voluntary phase-outs and restrictions on these compounds have been implemented over the last 10 to 15 years.

The extra heat that has entered the Pacific Ocean during the period of slow surface warming since 1998 has been transferred to the Indian Ocean, reports a study published online in Nature Geoscience. The findings reconcile reports of an enhanced heat uptake in the Pacific Ocean over the past 15 years or so with an observed decrease in the heat that is stored there.

Anna Reusch, a doctoral student at ETH's Geological Institute, was utterly amazed one morning: during a routine measuring run with her research vessel on Lake Neuchâtel, she suddenly saw an unusual shape on the control panel screen. Beneath the boat, at a depth of over 100 metres, had to be something no one had ever seen before. She immediately informed her professor, Michael Strasser: "We've found something that you absolutely have to see."

Microbial communities in urban waterways have the potential to play an important role in cleansing Singapore's waterways and also act as raw water quality indicators. A study found that canals designed to channel rainwater host microbial communities that could remove and neutralise organic pollutants in raw water. These organic pollutants are currently at trace levels in raw water - well below the United States-Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA) drinking water standards - which is removed during water treatment processes.

Researchers have published results in Environmental Research Letters confirming strong warming in the upper troposphere, known colloquially as the tropospheric hotspot. The hot has been long expected as part of global warming theory and appears in many global climate models.

The inability to detect this hotspot previously has been used by those who doubt man-made global warming to suggest climate change is not occurring as a result of increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

A new work based on 3-D supercomputer simulations of earthquake data has found hidden rock structures deep under East Asia. Researchers from China, Canada, and the U.S. worked together to publish their results in March 2015 in the American Geophysical Union Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth.

The scientists used seismic data from 227 East Asia earthquakes during 2007-2011, which they used to image depths to about 900 kilometers, or about 560 miles below ground.

Two generations ago there was a lot of doom and gloom about food but the obesity epidemic worldwide shows we have solved that problem, if not the distribution one. Bridging to a carbon-free future may not need to be done in a panic either, according to a paper in Biogeosciences. The model affirms other models stating that as carbon emissions continue to climb, so too has the Earth's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

About half of the emissions of CO2 each year remain in the atmosphere; the other half is taken up by the ecosystems on land and the oceans.