Earth
- Life
Climate changes, and there goes the neighborhood
The ranges of rattlesnakes and voles are likely to shift drastically with warming, analyses of past changes suggest.
- Earth
‘Fossil’ mountains entombed by ice
Cold temperatures have kept a buried Antarctic range fresh for hundreds of millions of years.
- Life
New species a little nipper
A mongoose-like creature from Madagascar is the first new carnivore to be discovered in more than two decades.
- Health & Medicine
Mice robbed of darkness fatten up
Time of day can affect calories' impact, a study shows.
- Earth
Oceanographers with flippers
Tracking seal dives off Antarctica reveals seafloor troughs that affect ocean circulation.
- Health & Medicine
Pesticide in womb may promote obesity, study finds
One-quarter of babies born to women who had relatively high concentrations of a DDT-breakdown product in their blood grew unusually fast for at least the first year of life. Not only is this prevalence of accelerated growth unusually high, but it’s also a worrisome trend since such rapid growth during early infancy has — in other studies — put children on track to become obese.
- Earth
Warming is accelerating global water cycle
Fresh water evaporates from the oceans, rains out over land and then runs back into the seas. A new study finds evidence that global warming has been speeding up this hydrological cycle recently, a change that could lead to more violent storms. It could also alter where precipitation falls — drying temperate areas, those places where most people now live.
- Life
Massive count a drop in the bucket
As the decade-long Census of Marine Life totes up thousands of new species, it leaves much yet to discover in the world’s oceans.
- Earth
Air pollution appears to foster diabetes
Epidemiological studies confirm previously published animal data.
- Physics
Glacier found to be deeply cracked
A new study finds deep fissures in Alaska ice that could affect future responses to melting.
- Earth
Contemplating an Arctic oil spill
The waters off northern Alaska may be “the largest oil province in the United States” after the Gulf, notes Edward Itta, a native of Barrow, Alaska. He is also mayor of the North Slope Borough, an 88,000-square-mile jurisdiction that runs across the upper part of the state. And in a September 27 videoconference with the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, he tried to impress upon the commissioners just how remote his neck of the tundra is.
- Chemistry
BP oil: Gulf sediment at risk, oceanographer claims
Most of BP’s spilled oil remains in the Gulf — with little sign of degrading, according to Ian MacDonald of Florida State University. And much of this surviving oil could be in sediment or on its way there, the scientist reported at a September 27 meeting in Washington, D.C.
