Scientists have found surprising evidence of rapid climate change in the Arctic: In the middle of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole, they discovered that the levels of radium-228 have almost doubled over the last decade.

We and all other animals wouldn’t be here today if our planet didn’t have a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere and oceans. But how crucial were high oxygen levels to the transition from simple, single-celled life forms to the complexity we see today?

Humans generated a staggering 44.7 million metric tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) in 2016 — the equivalent of 4,500 Eiffel Towers, and five per cent more than the electrical and electronic goods discarded just two years earlier, says a new study. 

There is a new way to measure the average temperature of the ocean thanks to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. In an article published in the Jan. 4, 2018, issue of the journal Nature, geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus and colleagues at Scripps Oceanography and institutions in Switzerland and Japan detailed their ground-breaking approach.

The Chinese megacity of Shenzhen has successfully switched 100 percent of its 16,359-vehicle bus fleet to electric vehicles, reaching its goal just six years after it vowed to move away from diesel engines, according to reporting by CleanTechnica and other news outlets. The fleet — which has three times as many buses as New York City — serves a population of 12 million. The switch is expected to save the equivalent of 345,000 tons of diesel fuel and cut 1.35 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Cultural evolution has made humans enormously potent ecosystem engineers and has enabled us to survive and flourish under a variety environmental conditions.

Large areas of the Earth’s surface are experiencing rising maximum temperatures, which affect virtually every ecosystem on the planet, including ice sheets and tropical forests that play major roles in regulating the biosphere, scientists have reported.

NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the South China Sea and obtained a visible light image of the first depression of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean basin’s 2018 tropical cyclone season. Vertical wind shear can be deadly to tropical cyclones and satellite data showed Tropical Depression Bolaven, formerly known as 01W, was being adversely affected by it.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP passed over newly formed Tropical Storm Ava and analyzed the storm in infrared light. Ava, the third tropical cyclone of the Southern Indian Ocean season formed off the coast of northeastern Madagascar on Jan. 3. 

Dodder, a parasitic plant that causes major damage to crops in the U.S. and worldwide every year, can silence the expression of genes in the host plants from which it obtains water and nutrients. This cross-species gene regulation, which includes genes that contribute to the host plant’s defense against parasites, has never before been seen from a parasitic plant. Understanding this system could provide researchers with a method to engineer plants to be resistant to the parasite. A paper describing the research by a team that includes scientists at Penn State and Virginia Tech appears January 4, 2018 in the journal Nature.