Simply by moving tropical soils down a mountainside into warmer environments, a team has discovered that much more CO2 may be released due to increased microbial activity as soils warm.
Read morePurple martins will soon migrate south for their usual wintertime retreat, but this time the birds will be wearing what look like little backpacks, so scientists can track their roosting sites along the way. The researchers recently discovered that purple martins are roosting in small forest patches as they migrate from North America to Brazil, an unexpected behavior.
Read moreResearchers are the first to show that lithium-carbon dioxide batteries can be designed to operate in a fully rechargeable manner, and they have successfully tested a lithium-carbon dioxide battery prototype running up to 500 consecutive cycles of charge/recharge processes.
Read moreEmissions of greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the climate, whereas small airborne particles in the atmosphere, aerosols, act as a cooling mechanism. That is the received wisdom in any case. However, new research can now show that the tiniest aerosols are increasing at the expense of the normal sized and slightly larger aerosols — and it is only the latter that have a cooling effect.
Read moreFor most plants, carbon dioxide acts like a steroid: The more they can take in, the bigger they get. But scientists have now discovered something strange happening in marshes. Under higher levels of carbon dioxide, instead of producing bigger stems, marsh plants produced more stems that were noticeably smaller.
Read moreNew research has highlighted a crop of inequality called cassava, which has starchy, tuberous roots that sustain more than 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, yet cassava has been largely neglected by research and development compared to the staple crops of wealthier regions. Researchers have identified opportunities to improve cassava yields — which have not increased for more than fifty years in Africa.
Read moreAs some of the most savvy and sophisticated predators out there, bats eavesdrop on their prey and even on other bats to collect a wide variety of information as they hunt.
Read moreA magma ocean existing during the core formation is thought to have been highly depleted in carbon due to its high-siderophile (iron loving) behavior. Thus, most of the carbon forming the atmosphere and life on Earth may have been delivered by a carbon-rich embryo after the core formation. However, a new high-pressure experiment has shown that previous studies may have overestimated the amount of carbon partitioning to the core.
Read moreIdentifying geological features in a densely vegetated, steep, and rough terrain can be almost impossible. Imagery like LiDAR can help researchers see through the tree cover, but subtle landforms can often be missed by the human eye.
Read moreMalaysia's plans to create a Pan-Borneo Highway will severely degrade one of the world's most environmentally imperiled regions, says a research team.
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