To the untrained eye, Jeremy Gustafson’s 1,600-acre farm looks like all the others spread out across Iowa. Gazing at his conventional corn and soybean fields during a visit in June, I was hard-pressed to say where his neighbor’s tightly planted row crops ended and Gustafson’s began.

In the underground rivers and flooded caves of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where Mayan lore described a fantastical underworld, scientists have found a cryptic world in its own right.

How safe is the water you drink? For the 45 million Americans who get their drinking water from private groundwater wells rather than a public utility, the answer is decidedly murky. The Environmental Protection Agency regulations that protect public drinking water systems don’t apply to privately owned wells, leaving owners responsible for ensuring their water is safe from contaminants.

The western corn rootworm continues to be on the rise in Europe. Why attempts to biologically target this crop pest by applying entomopathogenic nematodes have failed, can now be explained by the amazing defense strategy of this insect. In their new study, scientists from the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, show that the rootworm larvae are able to sequester plant defense compounds from maize roots in a non-toxic form and can activate the toxins whenever they need them to protect themselves against their own enemies. (eLife, November 2017, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.29307.001)

Marine bacteria that live in the dark depths of the ocean play a newly discovered and significant role in the global carbon cycle, according to a new study published in Science.

Study by Beatrice Magnani, USGS and other SMU scientists shows recent seismicity in Fort Worth Basin occurred on faults not active for 300 million years.

Fishes’ fear of sharks helps shape shallow reef habitats in the Pacific, according to new research by a scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences.

Flooding rivers can wreak havoc on homes and roads but are necessary for healthy ecosystems, research at Oregon State University suggests.

Researchers have determined how female grizzly bears keep their cubs safe while crossing the Trans-Canada Highway.

• Smallest microplastics in oceans – which go largely undetected - identified more effectively with innovative and cheap new method, developed by University of Warwick researchers
• New method can detect microplastics as small as the width of a human hair, using a fluorescent dye