Earth

  1. Health & Medicine

    For a lucky few, ‘dioxins’ might be heart healthy

    Dioxins and their kin are notorious poisons. They work by turning on what many biologists had long assumed was a vestigial receptor with no natural beneficial role. But it now appears that in a small proportion of people, this receptor may confer heart benefits.

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  2. Climate

    National academies to review IPCC procedures

    Global science organizations asked to help evaluate processes that produced 2007 climate report.

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  3. Climate

    Ancient Norse colonies hit bad climate times

    Temperatures in Iceland plummeted soon after settlers arrived, a new chemical analysis suggests.

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  4. Earth

    Green-ish pesticides bee-devil honey makers

    Pesticides are agents designed to rid targeted portions of the human environment of undesirable critters – such as boll weevils, roaches or carpenter ants. They’re not supposed to harm beneficials. Like bees. Yet a new study from China finds that two widely used pyrethroid pesticides – chemicals that are rather “green” as bug killers go – can significantly impair the pollinators’ reproduction.

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  5. Earth

    Country ants make it big in the city

    Odorous house ants act like invading aliens when they discover urban living.

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  6. Life

    Mature females key to beluga sturgeon survival

    Hatchery fish are unlikely to restore caviar-producing fish populations, a new assessment finds.

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  7. Earth

    Fowl surprise! Methylmercury improves hatching rate

    A pinch of methylmercury is just ducky for mallard reproduction, according to a new federal study. The findings are counterintuitive, since methylmercury is ordinarily a potent neurotoxic pollutant.

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  8. Space

    Geophysicists push age of Earth’s magnetic field back 250 million years

    South African rocks suggest that the earliest stages of life on Earth were protected from harmful solar radiation.

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  9. Earth

    Arctic seafloor a big source of methane

    Measurements show that Arctic undersea methane deposits, previously thought to be sealed by permafrost, are leaking into the atmosphere.

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  10. Earth

    Earth knocked for a loop

    Chile’s February 27 temblor, tectonically linked to another giant quake 50 years ago, sped up the Earth’s rotation and tipped the planet’s axis.

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  11. Chemistry

    Plasticizers kept from leaching out

    ‘Chemicals of concern’ may be made safer in new materials.

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  12. Agriculture

    Frogs: Clues to how weed killer may feminize males

    Atrazine, a widely used agricultural herbicide, not only can alter hormone levels in the developing frogs, but also perturb their physical development — and lead to an excess number of females, researchers report. Their new findings may help explain observations reported by a number of other research groups that at least in frogs, fairly low concentrations of atrazine can induce a feminization — or demasculinization.

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