The green sulfur bacterium makes its home in the chilly waters of the Black Sea. To eek out its lonely existence, this life form scavenges energy from the feeble sunlight available to it at a depth of over 250 feet.

A team of scientists has received US$100,000 grant to refine a mobile application (app) that uses artificial intelligence to diagnose crop diseases, and aims to help millions of African smallholders.

Trees in metropolitan areas have been growing faster than trees in rural areas worldwide since the 1960s. This has been confirmed for the first time by a study on the impact of the urban heat island effect on tree growth headed by the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The analysis conducted by the international research team also shows that the growth of urban trees has already been exposed to changing climatic conditions for a long period of time, which is only just beginning to happen for trees in rural areas.

By the end of 2017, global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and industry are projected to rise by about 2% compared with the preceding year, with an uncertainty range between 0.8% and 3%. The news follows three years of emissions staying relatively flat.

Songbirds exposed to widely used insecticides during migration pit stops on farmland could lose significant body weight and become disoriented, research by York University and the University of Saskatchewan (U. of S.) has found.

The researchers exposed white-crowned sparrows on spring migration to realistic doses of two different insecticides – imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid, and chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate – to see the effects on migratory activity, orientation and body mass.

A targeted expansion of climate observing systems could help scientists answer knotty questions about climate while delivering trillions of dollars in benefits, according to a new paper published today in the online journal Earth’s Future. Better observations would provide decision makers information they need to protect public health and the economy in the coming decades, the scientists say.

Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, director of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, said that improving our ability to predict and plan for droughts, floods, extreme heat events, famine, sea level rise and changes in freshwater availability is likely to  yield significant savings  each year.

Sitting in a dwarf galaxy about 500 million light years away, supernova iPTF14hls initially seemed like the ordinary explosion of a red giant star when it was discovered by the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) survey in September 2014. Then the brightness of this event lasted more than four times longer than a normal supernova.

Of the approximately two dozen medical CT scanners scattered throughout Stanford’s main campus and medical centers, two can be found nestled in basement labs of the Green Earth Sciences Buildings.

The School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with the Institut de Biologie Moléculaire des Plantes (CNRS, Strasbourg, France), has identified a new strategy to simultaneously enhance health-promoting vitamin E by ~6-fold and double both provitamin A and lycopene contents in tomatoes, to significantly boost antioxidant properties.

Worms and clams enhance the release of methane up to eight times more compared to sea bottoms without animals, shows a study by scientists at Stockholm University and Cardiff University.