Earth

  1. Climate

    Heat waves stunt grassland growth

    An abnormally hot year can significantly suppress growth in grasslands, a stifling effect that lingers well into the next year even if temperatures return to normal. It can also hinder how well the grasslands absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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  2. Astronomy

    McCain Is Bullish on R&D

    Featured blog: John McCain weighs in on science and technology issues with long-awaited written responses to the Science Debate 2008.

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  3. Paleontology

    Dino domination was in the cards, maybe

    A new study finds that early dinosaurs coexisted with and were outnumbered by a competing species. Dinosaurs eventually reigned supreme anyway, but perhaps not because they were better.

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  4. Tech

    Cops Might Get Pollution Sniffers

    One day soon, precise up-to-minute air pollution data might be available at a street-by-street level.

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  5. Agriculture

    Network Antennas — Yum!

    Sensor designers might have to consider engineering in bovine deterrence.

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  6. Earth

    Don’t blame the cities

    Urban sprawl is sometimes blamed for skewing weather data and creating a false signal of global warming, but a new study suggests this idea is just a lot of hot air.

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  7. Earth

    Mammoth migrations

    Ancient DNA shows North American woolly mammoths migrated back to Asia and displaced Siberian mammoths.

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  8. Earth

    Mighty hurricanes get mightier

    Peak winds in North Atlantic hurricanes and similar storms elsewhere in the world have gained speed during the past three decades, thanks to a warming trend in many of the ocean basins where such storms are spawned.

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  9. Earth

    Ice spy

    Radar altimeters on Earth-orbiting probes can detect and count small icebergs even under cloudy skies, providing warning to ships and invaluable data for scientists monitoring climate change.

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  10. Earth

    Past gasps

    Earth’s atmosphere during some past geological ages wasn’t as oxygen-deprived as previously thought, new experiments suggest.

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  11. Chemistry

    Popular plastics chemical poses further threat

    The chemical bisphenol A may raise the risk of heart attacks and type 2 diabetes by suppressing a protective hormone.

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  12. Chemistry

    Turning CO2 into chalk and sand

    Removing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and storing it permanently is one of the possible solutions to global warming, but remains expensive to do. A new technique could make carbon sequestration economical on a large scale, while producing useful materials on the side.

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