Santa Claus could be treading water sooner than thought. An improved forecast of Arctic sea ice coverage predicts that the region will have its first ice-free summer almost a decade earlier than previously projected.
Climate scientists fine-tuned simulations of future climate by adding ice‒ocean interactions and measurements that were more detailed than previously used. The tweaks reduce...
The wet undersides of deserts may stash as much as a trillion metric tons of climate-altering carbon, more than stored in all land-based plants, new research suggests.
Human activities such as burning fossil fuels spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists, however, can’t account for where as much as 30 percent of this CO2 ends up.
“We’ve found a carbon sink in...
The first large test of an Ebola vaccine in the field shows strong protection against the lethal virus. With the epidemic in West Africa now in retreat, the shot might hasten disease elimination in Guinea, which still has cases cropping up.
“This is a huge advance in the Ebola field,” says Thomas Geisbert, an immunologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “It’s been...
If you were to look up when walking through a forest in Japan, you might see “Kuma-dana,” or “bear shelves,” high in the trees. These patches of broken branches and dead leaves are created by Japanese black bears when they climb high to find fruit. That’s why climbing a tree...
Cooling an organ donor’s body after death might improve kidney function in transplant recipients.
Scientists compared the function of kidneys from 150 organ donors whose bodies were cooled to between 34˚ and 35˚ Celsius (93.2˚ to 95˚ Fahrenheit), and those from 152 donors whose bodies were kept warm at between 36.5˚ and 37.5˚ C (97.7˚ to 99.5˚ F). Doctors kept the bodies at those...
A few months back, two puffy, red eyes full of goop landed my toddler in the doctor’s office, where an exam also turned up two ear infections. This double-eye, double-ear whammy led to her first dose of antibiotics, post haste.
I was tremendously thankful for something that might make her feel better. But as she began slurping down her bubble gum-flavored medicine after breakfast, I...
The taste of certain fats.
Move over, umami. Fat is the newest member of the pantheon of basic tastes, joining salty, sweet, sour, bitter and savory, or umami.
Researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., conducted taste tests pitting a variety of fats against flavors in the other taste categories, such as monosodium...
News in Brief
A salamander-killing fungus hitchhiking via the international live-animal trade may prove especially disastrous if it invades three regions of North America.
Biologists haven’t reported the deadly fungus, Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or Bsal, loose on the continent yet,...
During its brief time awake on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Philae lander documented a diverse world. New analyses of lander data reveal the comet as uniform on the inside, but full of variety on the outside. Pebbles, boulders, cliffs and pits blanket the forbidding landscape. Complex organic molecules float above a surface that is as soft as sand in some places and as hard as rock in...
News in Brief
New robotic insects can hop on water. Researchers from Harvard University and Seoul National University in South Korea studied live water striders, which can skate and leap on water, to design the robots. The bots weigh just 68 milligrams and have bodies that are 2 centimeters long and legs 5 centimeters long.
Like real water striders, the robots...