Earth

Beyond the pounding surf loved by novelists and beachgoers alike, the ocean contains rolling internal waves beneath the surface that displace massive amounts of water and push heat and vital nutrients up from the deep ocean.

Internal waves have long been recognized as essential components of the ocean's nutrient cycle, and key to how oceans will store and distribute additional heat brought on by global warming. Yet, scientists have not until now had a thorough understanding of how internal waves start, move and dissipate.

A new study from the University of Cambridge has identified one of the oldest fossil brains ever discovered - more than 500 million years old - and used it to help determine how heads first evolved in early animals. The results, published today (7 May) in the journal Current Biology, identify a key point in the evolutionary transition from soft to hard bodies in early ancestors of arthropods, the group that contains modern insects, crustaceans and spiders.

Coffee silverskin (the epidermis of the coffee bean) is usually removed during processing, after the beans have been dried, while the coffee grounds are normally directly discarded.

In a new study, published in Nature this week, a research team led from Uppsala University in Sweden presents the discovery of a new microbe that represents a missing link in the evolution of complex life. The study provides a new understanding of how, billions of years ago, the complex cell types that comprise plants, fungi, but also animals and humans, evolved from simple microbes.

University of Oregon geologists have tapped water in surface rocks to show how magma forms deep underground and produces explosive volcanoes in the Cascade Range.

"Water is a key player," says Paul J. Wallace, a professor in the UO's Department of Geological Sciences and coauthor of a paper in the May issue of Nature Geoscience. "It's important not just for understanding how you make magma and volcanoes, but also because the big volcanoes that we have in the Cascades -- like Mount Lassen and Mount St. Helens -- tend to erupt explosively, in part because they have lots of water."

Plans for summer holidays are already taking shape. But before jetting off for some fun in the sun, many travellers will have to cope with long delays on the airport runway.

Thanks to new research from Concordia University, however, that time spent twiddling your thumbs on the tarmac could be significantly reduced.

DNA is synonymous with life, but where did it originate? One way to answer this question is to try to recreate the conditions that formed DNA's molecular precursors. These precursors are carbon ring structures with embedded nitrogen atoms, key components of nucleobases, which themselves are building blocks of the double helix.

While consumer demand for edamame or vegetable soybean remains on the rise in the United States, it's not widely grown in this country. Nearly 85 million acres of grain-type soybean were grown in the U.S. in 2014, yet edamame imported from Asia appears to dominate what we eat in this country, said a University of Illinois crop scientist.

Ethanol fuel refineries could be releasing much larger amounts of some ozone-forming compounds into the atmosphere than current assessments suggest, according to a new study that found emissions of these chemicals at a major ethanol fuel refinery are many times higher than government estimates.

For the first time, scientists have imaged thunder, visually capturing the sound waves created by artificially triggered lightning. Researchers from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) are presenting the first images at a joint meeting of American and Canadian geophysical societies in Montreal, Canada, May 3-7.

Boulder, Colo., USA - In a new paper published online by GSA Bulletin on 30 April, researchers Mark Richards and colleagues address the "uncomfortably close" occurrence of the Chicxulub impact in the Yucatán and the most voluminous phase of the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions in India. Specifically, the researchers argue that the impact likely triggered most of the immense eruptions of lava in India -- that indeed, this was not a coincidence, but a cause-and-effect relationship.

Two ocean hot spots have been found to be the potential drivers of the hottest summers on record for the Central US in 1934 and 1936. The research may also help modern forecasters predict particularly hot summers over the central United States many months out.

The unusually hot summers of 1934/36 broke heat records that still stand today. They were part of the devastating dust bowl decade in the US when massive dust storms travelled as far as New York, Boston and Atlanta and silt covered the decks of ships 450km off the east coast.

In the United States, nearly 15 million people and 1 in 13 children suffer from food allergy. In Arizona alone, every classroom contains at least two children with a food allergy.

Soybeans are one of the eight foods regulated by the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act, or FALPA. Soybean is a major ingredient in many infant formulas, processed foods and livestock feed used for agriculture. Soybeans contain several allergenic and anti-nutritional proteins that affect soybean use as food and animal feed.

The vivid pigmentation of zebras, the massive jaws of sharks, the fight or flight instinct and the diverse beaks of Darwin's finches. These and other remarkable features of the world's vertebrates stem from a small group of powerful cells, called neural crest cells, but little is known about their origin.

Now Northwestern University scientists propose a new model for how neural crest cells, and thus vertebrates, arose more than 500 million years ago.

Dispersal and adaptation are two fundamental evolutionary strategies available to species given an environment. Generalists, like dandelions, send their offspring far and wide. Specialists, like alpine flowers, adapt to the conditions of a particular place.

Ecologists have typically modeled these two strategies, and the selective pressures that trigger them, by holding one strategy fixed and watching how the other evolves. New research published in the journal Evolution illustrates the dramatic interplay during the co-evolution of dispersal and adaptation strategies.