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Environmental

A collection of 1035 articles

Features that make lizards appealing to potential mates are resilient to stress

"Animals in the wild experience stress every day when they flee from predators, fight with others over food, or face extreme weather," said Kirsty MacLeod, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State at the time of the research and lead author of the paper. "But they are facing increasing amounts of

Climate change to blame for Hurricane Maria's extreme rainfall

A new study analyzing Puerto Rico's hurricane history finds 2017's Maria had the highest average rainfall of the 129 storms to have struck the island in the past 60 years.

Megalith tombs were family graves in European Stone Age

Agriculture spread with migrants from the Fertile Crescent into Europe around 9,000 BCE, reaching northwestern Europe by 4,000 BCE.

Why lightning often strikes twice: New study reveals needle-like structures in positively charged lightning leaders

Needles "This finding is in sharp contrast to the present picture, in which the charge flows along plasma channels directly from one part of the cloud to another, or to the ground," explains Olaf Scholten, Professor of Physics at the KVI-CART institute of the University of Groningen. The reason why

Coelacanth reveals new insights into skull evolution

The coelacanth Latimeria is a marine fish closely related to tetrapods, four-limbed vertebrates including amphibians, mammals and reptiles.

Plants and microbes shape global biomes through local underground alliances

Princeton University researchers report that the organization of forests worldwide -- such as conifers in northern boreal forests or the broad-leafed trees of the tropics -- are based on the ancient relationships that plant species forged with soil-dwelling microbes such as fungi and bacteria. These tiny organisms, known as symbionts,

Best in snow: New scientific device creates electricity from snowfall: The first-of-its-kind nanogenerator also acts as a weather station

"The device can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries," said senior author Richard Kaner, who holds UCLA's Dr.

New species of early human found in the Philippines

Co-author and a lead member of the team, Professor Philip Piper from The Australian National University (ANU) says the findings represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of human evolution across Southeast Asia. The researchers uncovered the remains of at least two adults and one juvenile within the same archaeological

New evidence suggests volcanoes caused biggest mass extinction ever: Mercury found in ancient rock around the world supports theory that eruptions caused 'Great Dying' 252 million years ago.

The extinction 252 million years ago was so dramatic and widespread that scientists call it "the Great Dying." The catastrophe killed off more than 95 percent of life on Earth over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Paleontologists with the University of Cincinnati and the China University of

Amazonian soils mapped using indicator species

Amazonia is a vast rainforest area that is both megadiverse and poorly known.

New study shows people used natural dyes to color their clothing thousands of years ago

Chemists Dr Annemarie Kramell and Professor René Csuk from MLU examined two ancient textile samples.One comes from the ancient Chinese city of Niya and was probably once part of a shirt.

What Earth's gravity reveals about climate change

This so-called time-resolved satellite gravimetry makes it possible, among other things, to monitor the terrestrial water cycle, the mass balance of ice sheets and glaciers or sea-level change, and thus to better understand the mechanisms of the global climate system, to assess important climatic trends more precisely and to predict

Ice Ages occur when tropical islands and continents collide: Collisions in tropics expose rocks that take up carbon dioxide, cooling normally balmy Earth

The key trigger, they say, is mountain formation in the tropics as continental land masses collide with volcanic island arcs, such as the Aleutian Islands chain in Alaska.

Melting glaciers causing sea levels to rise at ever greater rates

Glaciers have lost more than 9,000 billion tons (that is 9,625,000,000,000 tons) of ice between 1961 and 2016, which has resulted in global sea levels increasing by 27 millimeters in this period..

Woolly mammoths and Neanderthals may have shared genetic traits: Findings point to molecular resemblance in climate adaptation traits of the two species

The research attributes the human-elephant relationship during the Pleistocene epoch to their mutual ecology and shared living environments, in addition to other possible interactions between the two species. The study was led by Prof. Ran Barkai and Meidad Kislev of TAU's Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and