Earth
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Bursting in Air: Satellites tally small asteroid hits
On average, a small asteroid slams into Earth's atmosphere and explodes with the energy of 1,000 Hiroshima-size blasts once every thousand years or so, a rate that is less than one-third as high as scientists previously supposed.
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Future Looks Cloudy for Arctic Ozone
Clouds that drive ozone loss in the Antarctic turned up in force during the most recent Arctic winter.
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Warm band may have girdled snowball Earth
A swath a liquid ocean may have hugged the planet's midriff even during the most frigid global climatic episodes between 800 million and 600 million years ago, allowing life to survive.
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Finned Pollution Is One Cost of Our Exotic Tastes
Diners in most countries are accustomed to having an international array of foods in their pantries and eateries. It started more than a millennium ago when spice traders plied the caravan routes linking China to Istanbul. From Turkey, traders shipped their condiments throughout Europe and eventually to the New World. Northern or Chinese snakehead (Channa […]
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Shaked Alaska: A sleepy fault wakes and reveals new links
One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded on U.S. land shook south-central Alaska on Nov. 3, revealing activity along the Denali fault.
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Pesticides block male hormones
Some common pesticides can block the ability of androgens, male sex hormones, to trigger normal gene activities.
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Weed killer feminizes fish
The weed killer atrazine can turn normally hermaphroditic fish into females, a new study shows.
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Wildfire Below: Smoldering peat disgorges huge volumes of carbon
Set alight by wildfires, thick beds of decaying tropical plant matter can pump massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, rivaling those produced globally each year from the combustion of fossil fuels.
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- Earth
Prescribed fire burns out of control
A fire set by the National Park Service to clear underbrush burned out of control, consuming more than 44,000 acres around Los Alamos, N.M.
- Earth
Once Upon a Lake
As Earth warmed at the end of the last ice age, the immense volumes of fresh water that occasionally and catastrophically spilled from Lake Agassiz—the long-defunct lake that formed as the ice sheet smothering Canada melted—may have caused global climate change and sudden rises in sea level.
