All Stories by Sid Perkins
- Earth
Dating a massive undersea slide
Pieces of moss buried in debris left along the Norwegian coast by an ancient tsunami have enabled geologists to better determine the date of the immense underwater landslide that triggered the inundation.
- Earth
Irony on High: Global warming cools, thins upper atmosphere
Increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the air, which cause temperatures at Earth’s surface to warm, will turn the upper layers of the atmosphere cooler and thinner in coming decades, new research suggests. This counterintuitive phenomenon, first predicted in the late 1980s and recently inferred from satellite data, will probably lead […]
- Earth
Rocking the House
A recent test that simulated the effect of a magnitude-6.7 earthquake on a full-size, wood-frame townhouse may help engineers and analysts design more earthquake-resistant homes. With sound and video.
- Earth
Dim Harvest: Asian air pollution has limited rice yields
Thick clouds of air pollution over southern Asia and increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere worldwide have reduced rice harvests in India for the past 2 decades.
- Earth
Balancing Act: El Niños and dust both affect coral bleaching
Most of the annual variation in the extent of coral bleaching in the Caribbean is driven by two factors: the amount of dust and other particles suspended in the atmosphere, and the climate phenomenon known as El Niño.
- Paleontology
Asian amber yields oldest known bee
A tiny chunk of amber from Southeast Asia contains the remains of a bee that's at least 35 million years older than any reported fossil of similar bees.
- Earth
The African source of the Amazon’s fertilizer
More than half of the airborne dust that provides vital nutrients to the Amazonian rainforest comes from a small corner of the Sahara.
- Earth
Dashing Rogues
Rogue waves, which tower over the waves that surround them, are probably more common than scientists had previously suspected.
- Earth
Not So Clean: Service industries emit greenhouse gases too
Service industries such as the retail trade are creating just as much planet-warming carbon dioxide as the manufacture and operation of motor vehicles do.
- Paleontology
Early tetrapod likely ate on shore
The skull structure of Acanthostega, a semiaquatic creature that lived about 365 million years ago, suggests that the animal fed on shore or in the shallows, not in deep water.
- Paleontology
Society sans frills
The discovery of the fossils of several young dinosaurs in one small space suggests that the members of one dinosaur group evolved complex social behaviors millions of years earlier than previously suspected.
- Paleontology
DNA analysis reveals extinct type of wolf
New genetic analyses of the remains of gray wolves found in Alaska indicate that a distinct subpopulation of that species disappeared at the end of the last ice age, possibly because of its dietary habits.
