Current levels of greenhouse gas emissions are putting nearly half of California’s natural vegetation at risk from climate stress, with transformative implications for the state’s landscape and the people and animals that depend on it, according to a study led by the University of California, Davis. However, cutting emissions so that global temperatures increase by no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) could reduce those impacts by half, with about a quarter of the state’s natural vegetation affected.

Man-made phosphorus pollution is reaching dangerously high levels in freshwater basins around the world, according to new research.

Your grandmother’s insistence that you receive more bug bites because you’re ‘sweeter’ may not be that far-fetched after all, according to pioneering research from Virginia Tech scientists.

Once abundant in Southern California, the foothill yellow-legged frog inexplicably vanished from the region sometime between the late 1960s and early 1970s. The reasons behind its rapid extinction have been an ecological mystery.

MIT researchers have devised a miniaturized system that can deliver tiny quantities of medicine to brain regions as small as 1 cubic millimeter. This type of targeted dosing could make it possible to treat diseases that affect very specific brain circuits, without interfering with the normal function of the rest of the brain, the researchers say.

A type of virus that dominates water samples taken from the world’s oceans has long escaped analysis because it has characteristics that standard tests can’t detect. However, researchers at MIT and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have now managed to isolate and study representatives of these elusive viruses, which provide a key missing link in virus evolution and play an important role in regulating bacterial populations, as a new study reports.

The potential solution discovered by University of Saskatchewan researchers for producers stuck with unsellable fusarium-infected wheat may actually put cash in the farmers’ pockets and open up a new worm-based niche market in the feed industry.

“We want to help producers by making use of grain that is worth nothing and that no one knows how to dispose of safely,” said Fiona Buchanan, animal and poultry science professor.

University of Guelph scientists have piggybacked on nature’s way to delay fruit ripening by inventing a preservative that increases shelf life and reduces produce spoilage.

Their research, published recently in two academic journals, may hold out huge economic benefits, especially in developing countries that depend on fruit production, said Gopinadhan Paliyath, a professor in U of G’s Department of Plant Agriculture.

Global surface temperatures surged by a record amount from 2014 to 2016, boosting the total amount of warming since the start of the last century by more than 25 percent in just three years, according to new University of Arizona-led research.

Nitrogen oxides — i.e. nitrogen compounds with varying amounts of oxygen — have a very bad reputation. They are produced among other things by burning fossil fuels. In regions with heavy traffic and a lot of industry, they occur in high concentrations and are made responsible for a large number of diseases of the respiratory system. However, nitrogen oxides also occur in nature. There they play an important role in the nitrogen cycle, which ensures that nitrogen, essential for life, is available in forms that the organisms can process.