Earth

Climate change may be responsible for the abrupt collapse of civilization on the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau around 2000 B.C.

WSU archaeologist Jade D'Alpoim Guedes and an international team of researchers found that cooling global temperatures at the end of the Holocene Climatic Optimum, a 4,000 year period of warm weather, would have made it impossible for ancient people on the Tibetan Plateau to cultivate millet, their primary food source.

New research by scientists at New Zealand's University of Otago suggests a need for a fundamental rethink of the evolutionary path of enzymes, the proteins vital to all life on Earth.

Enzymes catalyse a vast array of biologically relevant chemical reactions even in the simplest living cells.

Biochemist Dr Wayne Patrick says that people tend to imagine evolution as a slow and steady march from barely functional life forms in the primordial soup, towards a modern-day pinnacle of near perfection.

The ability to move one's body rapidly through water is a key to existence for many species on this blue planet of ours. The Persian carpet flatworm, the cuttlefish and the black ghost knifefish look nothing like each other - their last common ancestor lived 550 million years ago, before the Cambrian period - but a new study uses a combination of computer simulations, a robotic fish and video footage of real fish to show that all three aquatic creatures have evolved to swim with elongated fins using the same mechanical motion that optimizes their speed, helping to ensure their survival.

River deltas, low-lying landforms that host critical and diverse ecosystems as well as high concentrations of human population, face an uncertain future. Even as some deltas experience decreased sediment supply from damming, others will see increased sediment discharge from land-use changes. Accurate estimates of the current rate of subsidence in the Mississippi Delta (southern USA) are important for planning wetland restoration and predictions of storm surge flooding.

esearchers from the University of Liverpool have used mathematical equations to shed new light on how flowing fluid hinders the movement of bacteria in their search for food.

Many bacteria are mobile and inhabit a variety of dynamic fluid environments: from turbulent oceans to medical devices such as catheters.

Mathematicians from the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester developed a new set of equations to study how flowing fluid affected the movement of bacteria and how the swimming behaviour of the bacteria themselves affected their travel.

University of Sydney geoscientists have helped prove that some of the ocean's underwater volcanoes did not erupt from hot spots in the Earth's mantle but instead formed from cracks or fractures in the oceanic crust.

The discovery helps explain the spectacular bend in the famous underwater range, the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, where the bottom half kinks at a sixty degree angle to the east of its top half.

Many experimental and clinical data have demonstrated that antibiotic-resistance pathogens, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), may play a vital role in priming chronic inflammation. There is thus a great need to develop novel antibacterial materials, and particularly those that are less likely to lead to bacterial resistance.

The continual increase in global incomes means people are living more comfortably, including having the ability to afford air conditioning. Staying cool is good but there's a wealth of fallout. The demand for more "AC" will also cause consumers to use more electricity causing stress on energy prices, infrastructure, and environmental policy, according to a new study.

Unknown to most people, the Pacific Northwest experiences a magnitude-6.6 earthquake about once a year. The reason nobody notices is that the movement happens slowly and deep underground, in a part of the fault whose behavior, known as slow-slip, was only recently discovered.

One of the concerns about the switch from the government-mandated switch from incandescent to fluorescent lighting was that while the ballasts were higher frequency now - humans did not have to hear that annoying hum - they were right in the range that pets still hear.

Reported emissions of a group of potent greenhouse gases from developed countries are shown to be largely accurate, but for the wrong reasons, according to new findings from an international team, led by researchers at the University of Bristol,UK.

The ocean has been sucking up heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) building up in our atmosphere--with a little help from tiny plankton. Like plants on land, these plankton convert CO2 into organic carbon via photosynthesis. But unlike land plants that are held fast to terra firma, plankton can sink into the deep ocean, carrying carbon with them. Along the way they decompose when bacteria convert their remains back into CO2.

Although closely related to the notorious carnivore Tyrannosaurus rex, a new lineage of dinosaur discovered in Chile is proving to be an evolutionary jigsaw puzzle, as it preferred to graze upon plants.

Palaeontologists are referring to Chilesaurus diegosuarezi as a 'platypus' dinosaur because of its extremely bizarre combination of characters that include a proportionally small skull and feet more akin to primitive long-neck dinosaurs.

Hot vents on the seabed could have spontaneously produced the organic molecules necessary for life, according to new research by UCL chemists. The study shows how the surfaces of mineral particles inside hydrothermal vents have similar chemical properties to enzymes, the biological molecules that govern chemical reactions in living organisms. This means that vents are able to create simple carbon-based molecules, such as methanol and formic acid, out of the dissolved CO2 in the water.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), gave bumblebees the option to choose between a sugar solution with nicotine in it and one without. Those bees infected with the Crithidia bombi parasite were more likely to go for the nicotine-laced nectar than those that weren't infected.