Climate Change

Philadelphia, PA — If sperm can’t swim, life can’t go on. And a new study suggests that when evolution hit upon an effective strategy for making sperm move, it stuck with it.  A molecular pathway governing sperm motility is shared between corals, sea urchins, and even humans, according to research by a team from Penn’s […]

La Jolla, CA — Scientists have carefully studied the intricacies of how individual organisms live and act together in groups known as biological collectives. In “superorganisms” such as bee colonies, the interactions of the individual members add up to benefit the entire colony. Details have been elusive on how colonies make decisions in the face […]

New York, NY — Something big happened to the planet about a million years ago. There was a major shift in the response of Earth’s climate system to variations in our orbit around the Sun. The shift is called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. Before the MPT, cycles between glacial (colder) and interglacial (warmer) periods happened every […]

Cambridge, UK — A study led by the University of Cambridge has found that periodic mass outbreaks of leaf-munching caterpillars can improve the water quality of nearby lakes – but may also increase the lakes’ carbon dioxide emissions. Outbreaks of caterpillars of invasive gypsy moths, Lymantria dispar dispar, and forest tent caterpillar moths, Malacasoma disstria […]

Durham, NC — It’s hard to know what climate change will mean for Earth’s interconnected and interdependent webs of life. But one team of researchers at Duke University says we might begin to get a glimpse of the future from just a few ounces of microbial soup. Every drop of pond water and teaspoon of […]

Berkeley, CA — Mountain snowpacks around the world are on the decline, and if the planet continues to warm, climate models forecast that snowpacks could shrink dramatically and possibly even disappear altogether on certain mountains, including in the western United States, at some point in the next century. A new study led by researchers at […]

New York, NY — With warming climate, summer sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking fast, and now consistently spans less than half the area it did in the early 1980s. This raises the question: It this keeps up, in the future will year-round sea ice—and the creatures who need it to survive—persist anywhere? […]

Norwich, UK — Consuming sustainably sourced wild meat instead of domesticated livestock reduces greenhouse gas emissions and retains precious tropical forest systems, which in turn mitigates the effects of climate change. That’s according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul, published Oct. 7 […]

Sydney, Australia — It is commonly assumed that any important scientific knowledge would be available in English, and so scientific knowledge used in international studies is predominantly sourced from English-language documents. But is this assumption correct? According to research published October 7 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Dr. Tatsuya Amano at […]

Tempe, AZ — Meeting society’s growing energy needs has become a daunting challenge for humanity. Demands for energy are expected to nearly double by the year 2050, while the effects of climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, are already wreaking havoc in the form of droughts, wildfires, floods and other disasters. Gary […]

Munich, Germany — Living trees absorb a considerable amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and therefore play an important role in the protection of our climate. Little is known about the role of dead trees in the global carbon cycle, though. The decomposition of wood and the recycling of the nutrients it contains are […]

Nahant, MA — Between 35.6% and 95% of 20th century ocean surface climates — defined by surface water temperature, pH and the concentration of the mineral aragonite — may disappear by 2100, depending on how greenhouse gas emissions develop in the first half of the 21st century, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. The findings also […]