A colourful summer marine phytoplankton bloom fills much of the Baltic Sea in this Envisat image.

Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that drift on or near the surface of the sea, by far the most abundant type of life found in the ocean. Just like plants on land they employ green-pigmented chlorophyll for photosynthesis – the process of turning sunlight into chemical energy.

While individually microscopic, phytoplankton chlorophyll collectively tints the surrou

About one hundred years ago, S. Arrhenius brought forward a hypothesis that the atmospheric temperature of at the surface of the Earth was increasing under the influence of the glasshouse effect created by carbonic acid gas. Since that time, the researchers, when simulating the planet climate, have mainly focused on O2 and it is water vapour that comprises the largest mass of all greenhouse gases. Thanks to water vapour and clouds, the average temperature at the surface of the planet is about 1

Being seasick is not a problem for scientists on a major expedition now under way in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. That’s because most of the researchers investigating the eerie Lost City hydrothermal vent field are working “aboard” a landlocked science command center in Seattle.

Only four scientists are with University of Rhode Island oceanographer Bob Ballard aboard the Ronald H. Brown, a research vessel operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrat

Presence of canine predator cascades through populations of elk, trees, beavers, and songbirds

Willow trees, riparian willow warblers and beaver dams once were bountiful in an area near the town of Banff, Alberta, Canada. But once wolves left this area, elk grew more plentiful, browsing heavily on young willows. Today, there is little trace of beavers, and sparrows have replaced the warblers in what is now a grassland meadow. These profound changes were driven by the absence

Since Darwin, the peacock exhibiting an elongated tail composed of ocelli has been considered a prime example of the strength of sexual selection. Professor Marion Petrie’s classical studies have shown that females prefer males with a high number of ocelli. However, a remaining question concerning the role played by ocelli is how peahens value their number. New research published today in Ethology describes that females may actually assess ocelli density.

Adeline Loyau, Michel Saint

Results from KamLAND, an underground neutrino detector in central Japan, show that anti-electron neutrinos emanating from the earth, so-called geoneutrinos, can be used as a unique window into the interior of our planet, revealing information that is hidden from other probes.

“This is a significant scientific result,” said Stuart Freedman, a nuclear physicist with a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of Californi

Earth’s cool, rigid upper layer, known as the lithosphere, rides on top of its warmer, more pliable neighbor, the asthenosphere, as a series of massive plates. Plates continuously shift and break, triggering earthquakes, sparking volcanic eruptions, sculpting mountains and carving trenches under the sea.

But what, exactly, divides the lithosphere and the asthenosphere? In the latest issue of Nature, a trio of geophysicists from Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of

First global map reveals rapidly shrinking hotspots for tuna, marlin, swordfish

Diversity has declined by up to 50% over 50 years due to fishing

A new study released in Science (via Science Express http://www.sciencexpress.org) on July 28th reveals a striking downward trend in the diversity of fish in the open ocean – the largest and least known part of our planet. Teasing apart the effects of climate change and fishing over the past 50 years, the authors show a clear

Fiery chillies keep elephants out of crops and make a great sauce, African entrepreneurs say

What do hot sauce aficionados and African elephants have in common? They both feel the burn of chilli peppers, the key ingredient for resolving human-elephant conflicts in Africa while raising money for farmers and conservation.

Supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other groups, the Elephant Pepper Development Trust (EPDT) has not only promoted the use of

In Jules Verne’s nineteenth century classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an Edinburgh professor and colleagues follow an explorer’s trail down an extinct volcano to the Earth’s core. Ah, fantasy! Here’s reality: For more than a century after Verne wrote his novel, geophysicists have had only one tool with which to peer into our planet’s heart-seismology, or analysis of vibrations produced by earthquakes and sensed by thousands of instrument stations worldwide. But now, geophysicists have

The rivers of South America’s Amazon basin are “breathing” far harder – cycling the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide more quickly – than anyone realized.

Most of the carbon being exhaled – or outgassed – as carbon dioxide from Amazonian rivers and wetlands has spent a mere 5 years sequestered in the trees, other plants and soils of the surrounding landscape, U.S. and Brazilian researchers report in the July 28 issue of Nature.

It had been hoped that regions such as the

Almost 150 years after Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for biological evolution, previously unrecognized diversity has been discovered among the giant tortoises of the Galápagos, Geochelone nigra, whose distinctiveness was an inspiration in formulating the theory of natural selection.

The new taxon (species or sub-species) of Galápagos tortoise was characterized by a team of scientists led by Michael Russello, Adalgisa Caccone and Jeffrey Powell in the Department of Ecolog

During last week’s enervating hot spell in the Northeast, the discomfort was not entirely due to the heat or the relative humidity. The real culprit, say Cornell University climatologists, was the high dew point.

The dew point is the day-to-day measure of humidity in the atmosphere. Another critical measure is the “design dew point” — the maximum humidity level at which air-conditioning systems can operate efficiently in different regions.

According to the Northe

Fruit-eating fish in South America help disperse fruit trees during flood season. Fungi that attack sea fans get even nastier when the tropical waters warm by just a few degrees, and although sea fans counterattack with upgraded defenses, the fungi win out. A moth that attacks pine trees has expanded its range in the past three decades, and tests show that global warming is to blame.

These are just three of the research results that almost 50 Cornell University scientists w

A central goal of ecology is to determine the mechanisms that explain large-scale patterns of abundance and distribution of the earth’s organisms. For most organisms, however, these mechanisms remain elusive. In an article in the August 2005 issue of The American Naturalist, Stefan A. Schnitzer reports that the abundance of lianas (woody vines), a taxonomically diverse and important group of plants, actually decreases in tropical forests as mean annual precipitation increases, a pattern prec

One of the world’s most endangered whales, the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), is on a path toward extinction due to collisions with ships and entanglements in fishing gear, according to Cornell University whale expert Christopher Clark.

A paper co-authored by Clark in the latest issue of the journal Science (July 22, 2005) urges emergency measures, such as reducing boat speeds, rerouting shipping lanes around the whales’ migratory paths and modifyin