U.S. corn production is booming as Midwestern farmers adopt new technologies and methods in agriculture that mitigate bad weather, destructive pests and weeds. But the long-term outlook isn’t good. New research published yesterday in Nature Food shows maize is becoming more vulnerable to drought, a finding with major implications for annual […]
The idea of modifying Earth’s atmosphere to cool the planet, once seen as too risky to seriously consider, is attracting new money and attention. Investors watch out! As the effects of climate change become more devastating, prominent research institutions and government agencies are focusing new money and attention on […]
The 5-inch segment of fossilized jaw, which was discovered in Antarctica in the 1980s, dates from 40 million years ago. Using the fossils’ size and measurements, the researchers were able to estimate the rest of the individuals’ size. The bird with the foot bone is “the largest specimen […]
Scientists at two of America’s biggest automakers knew as early as the 1960s that car emissions caused climate change, a monthslong investigation by E&E News has found. The discoveries by General Motors and Ford Motor Co. preceded decades of political lobbying by the two car giants that undermined […]
Heftier than modern-day gray wolves and capable of cracking the bones of their prey, dire wolves were among the Pleistocene’s most-feared hunters. It’s long been believed that these top predators lived only in the Americas, but researchers have now unearthed the first fossil evidence that dire wolves also […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a satellite on November 10 that can measure rising sea levels from orbit. The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite will update maps of the oceans every 10 days, showing scientists how much rising sea levels are eroding coastlines. On-board digital altimeters can measure millimeter-scale […]
The dodo? The woolly mammoth? Think again. Sometime in the late 1600s, in the lush forests of Mauritius, the very last dodo took its last breath. After centuries of untroubled ferreting in the tropical undergrowth, this species met its untimely end at the hands of humans, who had […]
Images from satellites high above the Earth have helped a research team put together a stark visual chronicle of decades of glacier disintegration in Antarctica. Meanwhile, a separate international research team has taken the opposite perspective – studying the ice from its underbelly. Both teams are documenting the […]
Brazilian researchers discover that caecilians, limbless amphibians resembling worms or snakes that emerged some 150 million years before the latter, can probably inject venom into their prey while biting. A group led by researchers at Butantan Institute in Brazil and supported by FAPESP has described for the first […]
The joint U.S.-European Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich is the next in a line of Earth-observing satellites that will collect the most accurate data yet on sea level and how it changes over time. With millimeter-scale precision, data from this mission will allow scientists to precisely measure sea surface height […]
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