• Peas that like it hot

    Farmers across the world produce between 10 and 13 million tons of field pea every year. That makes it a top legume crop, just behind dry beans and chickpeas.

    >> Read the Full Article
  • NASA's Aqua Satellite spots Typhoon Hato's Landfall in China

    NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over Typhoon Hato just hours after it made landfall in southeastern China. 

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Sub-tropical corals vulnerable, new study shows

    The vulnerability and conservation value of sub-tropical reefs south of the Great Barrier Reef - regarded as climate change refuges – has been highlighted in a new study.

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Climate change is luring Kodiak bears away from their iconic salmon streams

    Kodiak brown bears are abandoning salmon–their iconic prey–due to climate change, according to a new study.  

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Plants Under Heat Stress Must Act Surprisingly Quickly to Survive

    In new results reported in The Plant Cell, molecular biologist Elizabeth Vierling at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues in India and China report finding a crucial mechanism that plants need to recover from heat stress.

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Methane Hydrate is not a Smoking Gun in the Arctic Ocean

    Clathrate (hydrate) gun hypothesis stirred quite the controversy when it was posed in 2003. It stated that methane hydrates – frozen water cages containing methane gas found below the ocean floor – can melt due to increasing ocean temperatures.

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Hidden river once flowed beneath Antarctic ice

    Antarctic researchers from Rice University have discovered one of nature’s supreme ironies: On Earth’s driest, coldest continent, where surface water rarely exists, flowing liquid water below the ice appears to play a pivotal role in determining the fate of Antarctic ice streams.

    The finding, which appears online this week in Nature Geoscience, follows a two-year analysis of sediment cores and precise seafloor maps covering 2,700 square miles of the western Ross Sea. As recently as 15,000 years ago, the area was covered by thick ice that later retreated hundreds of miles inland to its current location. The maps, which were created from state-of-the-art sonar data collected by the National Science Foundation research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, revealed how the ice retreated during a period of global warming after Earth’s last ice age. In several places, the maps show ancient water courses — not just a river system, but also the subglacial lakes that fed it.

    >> Read the Full Article
  • NASA Gets a Final Look at Hurricane Gert's Rainfall

    Before Hurricane Gert became a post-tropical cyclone, NASA got a look at the rainfall occurring within the storm. After Gert became post-tropical NOAA’s GOES-East satellite captured an image as Gert was merging with another system.

    The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core observatory satellite provided rainfall information on Hurricane Gert on August 16, 2017 at 5:37 p.m. EDT (2137 UTC). At that time, Gert was a strong category two hurricane with maximum sustained winds of about 93.5 mph (85 knots).

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Climate Change and Habitat Conversion Combine to Homogenize Nature

    Climate change and habitat conversion to agriculture are working together to homogenize nature, indicates a study in the journal Global Change Biology led by the University of California, Davis.

    In other words, the more things change, the more they are the same.

    While the individual impacts of climate change and habitat conversion on wildlife are well-recognized, little is known about how species respond to both stressors at once.

    >> Read the Full Article
  • Right kind of collaboration is key to solving environmental problems

    The coming decade may determine whether humanity will set a course toward a more socially and ecologically sustainable society. A crucial part of this goal is to develop a better understanding of how cooperation can be improved and become more effective, both within and among private stakeholders and public institutions.

    “Collaborative governance is often highlighted as a solution to different environmental problems. For example, when small-scale fishermen agree to avoid overfishing or when states agree to reduce greenhouse gases. But we don’t know so much about how cooperation around environmental issues works in a complex world. Different actors want different things, different environmental problems are related to each other, and different groups have differing amounts of influence. Does cooperation actually lead to a better environment?” says Örjan Bodin, lecturer at the Stockholm Resilience Centre who conducts interdisciplinary research on better ways to handle diverse environmental problems.

    >> Read the Full Article