Earth

  1. Life

    Shipping noise can disturb porpoises and disrupt their mealtime

    Noise from ships may disturb harbor porpoises enough to keep them from getting the food they need.

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  2. Plants

    Ancient ozone holes may have sterilized forests 252 million years ago

    Swaths of barren forest may have led to Earth’s greatest mass extinction.

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  3. Ecosystems

    Humans are overloading the world’s freshwater bodies with phosphorus

    Human activities are driving phosphorus levels in the world’s lakes and other freshwater bodies to a critical point.

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  4. Animals

    A peek into polar bears’ lives reveals revved-up metabolisms

    Polar bears have higher metabolisms than scientists thought. In a world with declining Arctic sea ice, that could spell trouble.

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  5. Agriculture

    Grapevines are more drought-tolerant than thought

    Grapevines handle drought better than previously thought. This could inform irrigation management.

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  6. Earth

    Gassy farm soils are a shockingly large source of these air pollutants

    California’s farm soils produce a surprisingly large amount of smog-causing air pollutants.

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  7. Earth

    Life may have been possible in Earth’s earliest, most hellish eon

    Heat from asteroid bombardment during Earth’s earliest eon wasn’t too intense for life to exist on the planet, a new study suggests.

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  8. Environment

    Plastic pollution increases risk of devastating disease in corals

    Researchers estimate about 11 billion pieces of plastic are polluting Asia-Pacific corals, raising the risk of disease at scores of reefs.

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  9. Earth

    Overlooked air pollution may be fueling more powerful storms

    The tiniest particles in air pollution aren’t just a health threat. They also strengthen thunderstorms, new research suggests.

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  10. Earth

    Robots map largest underwater volcanic eruption in 100 years

    High-resolution mapping of a 2012 underwater volcanic eruption just goes to show there’s a lot we don’t know about deep-sea volcanism.

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  11. Earth

    Volume of fracking fluid pumped underground tied to Canada quakes

    Study links volume of fracking fluid injected underground with hundreds of quakes in central Canada, and not the rate at which the fluids were injected.

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  12. Animals

    The mystery of vanishing honeybees is still not definitively solved

    The case has never been fully closed for colony collapse disorder, and now bees face bigger problems.

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