ENN
Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
The world produces more corn by weight than any other cereal crop. Corn, also known as maize, is a staple food in many countries. But farmers growing corn face many challenges, such as drought, diseases, and pests.
Rutgers researchers have created an automated blood drawing and testing device that provides rapid results, potentially improving the workflow in hospitals and other health-related institutions to allow health care practitioners to spend more time treating patients.
One of the major concerns in climate change studies is how the thermal conditions for the living environment of human beings will change in the future. In a paper recently published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters, Prof. GAO Xuejie from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his coauthors, try to answer this question based on their recently completed and unprecedented set of high-resolution (25 km) 21st century climate change simulations. These simulations were produced using the regional climate model RegCM4, driven by four global model simulations over China—the country with the world’s largest population.
Three-dimensional measurements of the central Brazilian Amazon rainforest have given NASA researchers a detailed window into the high number of branch falls and tree mortality that occur in response to drought conditions. They found that 65 percent more trees and large branches died due to an El Niño-driven drought in 2015-2016 than compared to an average year. Understanding the effects of prolonged drought gives scientists a better sense of what may happen to carbon stored in tropical forests if these events become more common in the future.
The planets and moons of our solar system are continuously being bombarded by particles hurled away from the sun. On Earth this has hardly any effect, apart from the fascinating northern lights, because the dense atmosphere and the magnetic field of the Earth protect us from these solar wind particles. But on the Moon or on Mercury things are different: There, the uppermost layer of rock is gradually eroded by the impact of sun particles.
Biologists get a new look at plant biodiversity and function with new imaging technology developed at the University of Alberta.
