SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
In one of the first long-term studies to explore how changing soils have impacted plant water uptake, researchers report that plants in soil leached by polluted rain drink more water. These findings reveal acid rain’s long-term impact on large-scale forest water cycles, which is critical for understanding future water availability, and they could also help … Read more
Scientists have long worried that air pollution, while having a devastating impact on human health, may paradoxically have been acting as a ‘brake’ on the heating of the atmosphere. Pollution particles help clouds to form with more water droplets, meaning they reflect more of the sun’s energy back into space. Until now, the extent to … Read more
A plethora of physicochemical processes must have created the conditions that enabled living systems to emerge on the early Earth. In other words, the era of biological evolution must have been preceded by a – presumably protracted – phase of ‘prebiotic’ chemical evolution, during which the first informational molecules capable of replicating themselves were assembled … Read more
A University of Oklahoma-led study generated improved annual maps of tropical forest cover in the Brazilian Amazon in 2000-2017 and provided better characterization on the spatio-temporal dynamics of forest area, loss and gain in this region. The Amazon basin has the largest tropical forests in the world. Rapid changes in land use, climate and other … Read more
Climate action without careful planning and reform can be costly – but a new study shows that the benefits of global action on climate largely outweigh the hazards. Researchers found that there are approximately four times fewer trade-offs than synergies between climate action and the targets of the UN’s global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Published … Read more
Researchers have developed a new method to allow for the first direct measurement of the submarine melt rate of a tidewater glacier, and, in doing so, they concluded that current theoretical models may be underestimating glacial melt by up to two orders of magnitude. In a National Science Foundation-funded project, a team of scientists, led … Read more
Tropical rainforests store large quantities of carbon dioxide, produce oxygen and provide habitats for many animal and plant species. If these ecosystems, which are so important for the global climate and biodiversity, are destroyed, they will recover very slowly, if at all. Scientists from the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, … Read more
Using YouTube to learn about climate-change-related topics will expose you to video content that mostly opposes worldwide scientific consensus. That’s the finding of a new study published in Frontiers in Communication, which also reveals that some scientific terms, such as geoengineering, have been ‘hijacked’ by conspiracy theorists so that searches provide entirely non-scientific video content. Scientists … Read more
About a dozen megadroughts struck the American Southwest during the 9th through the 15th centuries, but then they mysteriously ceased around the year 1600. What caused this clustering of megadroughts – that is, severe droughts that last for decades – and why do they happen at all? If scientists can understand why megadroughts happened in … Read more
A new reconstruction of global average surface temperature change over the past 2,000 years has identified the main causes for decade-scale climate changes. The analysis suggests that Earth’s current warming rate, caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, is higher than any warming rate observed previously. The researchers also found that airborne particles from volcanic eruptions … Read more