What caused the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history 251 million years ago? An asteroid or comet colliding with Earth? A greenhouse effect? Volcanic eruptions in Siberia? Or an entirely different culprit? A Northwestern University chemical engineer believes the culprit may be an enormous explosion of methane (natural gas) erupting from the ocean depths.

In an article published in the September issue of Geology, Gregory Ryskin, associate professor of chemical engineering, suggests t

Researchers see how robots respond in real-world rescue operations with FEMA’s Indiana Task Force 1 An earthquake has just laid waste to a small town. Major roads are impassable, and downed trees have cut power. Worse yet, the local library collapsed during the sudden temblor, trapping a half-dozen patrons. The robots are rushed in to help locate and free the survivors. That was the scenario facing a group of 14 researchers and a crew of search-and-rescue robots as they

Scientists are a step closer to understanding how the world’s oceans influence global warming – as well supply us with the oxygen we breathe.

A study led by Imperial College London has revealed how the most abundant ocean bound photosynthetic bacterium helps control levels of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

Reporting in Nature the researchers provide new detail on how Prochlorococcus cyanobacteria traps atmospheric carbon dioxide and stores it in the deep sea.

Wo

The concentration of certain toxic organic chemicals in waterway sediments can be reduced by 83 percent using electron beams—the same technology already used to decontaminate mail—scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland will report in the Sept. 1 issue of Environmental Science & Technology. In an additional series of laboratory experiments, the team found that ultraviolet light also can substantially reduce the concentration of these ch

Global warming isn’t what it used to be.

“Some people will tell you that the planet has warmed in the past and that species always managed to adapt, so there’s no cause for alarm. Unfortunately that’s not the case,” said Johannes Foufopoulos, assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment. Foufopoulos says new research illustrates major differences between global warming today and past natural climate fluctuations as they relate to spec

A paper in this week’s journal Nature, building on radically new ecological theory by University of Georgia professor Stephen Hubbell, challenges half-century-old ideas about how natural plant and animal communities are put together.

The paper in Nature includes research by physicists Jayanth Banavar and Igor Volkov of Penn State University and Amos Maritan of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, along with Hubbell.

Conventional ecological theory s

The Energy and Biodiversity Initiative (EBI), a partnership of four energy companies and five conservation organizations, release collaborative report, Energy and Biodiversity: Integrating Biodiversity Conservation into Oil and Gas Development

The Energy and Biodiversity Initiative (EBI), a partnership of four energy companies and five conservation organizations, released its collaborative report, “Energy and Biodiversity: Integrating Biodiversity Conservation into Oil and Gas Develop

Some of the defenses plants use to fight off disease leave them more susceptible to attack by insects, according to a Don Cipollini, Ph.D., a chemical ecologist at Wright State University.

Cipollini, an assistant professor of biological sciences, will present a research paper on this topic at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Savannah, Ga., on Tuesday, Aug. 5. Some 3,000 national and international scientists are expected to attend the meeting.

“Plant Resis

Melbourne scientists plan to harness the strange appetite of newly discovered Australian bacteria to help purify arsenic-contaminated water.

The research group, led by microbiologist Dr Joanne Santini of La Trobe University, is working out how to use bacteria that eat arsenic to clean up contaminated wastewater in Australian and overseas mining environments and drinking wells in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India.

Dr Santini presented her research at Fresh Science, a British Council

USDA Forest Service researchers at the Southern Institute of Forest Genetics (SIFG) in Saucier, MS are mapping genes in the pathogen that causes fusiform rust to provide future forest managers with more insurance against the damaging disease.

Fusiform rust, a fungus that forms spindle-shaped galls on the branches and stems of pine trees, is endemic to the southern U.S., occurring from Maryland to Florida and west to Texas and southern Arkansas. Attacking several southern pine species, the f

Over the last decade the market has had a tendency to value food products that are healthy and safe and encourage healthy lifestyles, with the added parameter that their associated production processes are environmentally sound. In the case of systems of cattle production the current and future aim is the obtaining of a quality product within an environmentally and economically sustainable framework.

Both objectives ultimately depend on animal feeding. The composition of the diet can have r

While croplands may provide more food than forests, they don’t offer much relief from hot tropical climes, a new study finds.

A study of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, which used NASA satellites and computer models, reports that cutting down tropical forests and converting grasslands to crops may inadvertently warm those local areas. According to the research, forest canopies create wind turbulence that cools the air, and native grasslands are better adapted to the tropics than crops, in ways

“My observations from a few years ago were that Ice Stream D in the West Antarctic was slowing to about half average speed and then speeding up,” says Dr. Sridhar Anandakrishnan, associate professor of geoscience, Penn State.

Bread wheat plants carrying a newly discovered gene that is resistant to economically devastating leaf blotch can reduce the amount of grain lost to the pathogen, according to Purdue University researchers.

The scientists used bread wheat species to find the gene and the markers, or bits of DNA, that indicate presence of the naturally occurring gene. The fungus causes wheat crop damage worldwide with yield losses of 50 percent or more in some places. In the United States the disease is wide

Scientists using data from a NASA satellite have found another piece in the global climate puzzle created by El Niño. El Niño events produce more of a steady rain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This is important because whenever there is a change in the amount and duration of rainfall over an area, such as the central Pacific, it affects weather regionally and even worldwide.

The findings appeared in a paper authored by Courtney Schumacher and Robert Houze, atmospheric scientists at t

New evidence suggest earth’s soil may be as important as its atmosphere

New evidence is emerging on the probable effects of an anticipated reliance on hydrogen as a fuel: surprisingly, we may need to look down in the ground rather up in the air, for answers.

In the August 21 issue of the journal Nature, a group of researchers from the California Institute of Technology and other institutions reports results of a study of the atmospheric chemical reactions that produce a