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.
For the first time ever, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Stockholm University, have compiled a global analysis of all plant extinction records documented from across the world. This unique dataset published today in leading journal Nature, Ecology & Evolution, brings together data from fieldwork, literature and herbarium specimens, to show how many … Read more
The vast subtropical “gyres” – large systems of rotating currents in the middle of the oceans – cover 40 percent of the Earth’s surface and have long been considered biological deserts with stratified waters that contain very little nutrients to sustain life. These regions also are thought to be remarkably stable, yet scientists have documented … Read more
Soil food webs play a key role in supporting grassland ecosystems, which cover about one-quarter of the land on Earth. Climate change poses a threat to these environments, partly because of the uncertainty of extremes in rainfall, which is projected to increase. To learn more about the effects of these extreme events, a team of soil … Read more
The winter ice on the surface of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea occasionally forms an enormous hole. A hole that appeared in 2016 and 2017 drew intense curiosity from scientists and reporters. Though even bigger gaps had formed decades before, this was the first time oceanographers had a chance to truly monitor the unexpected gap in Antarctic … Read more
A recent forecast of the size of the “Dead Zone” in the northern Gulf of Mexico for late July 2019 is that it will cover 8,717-square-miles of the bottom of the continental shelf off Louisiana and Texas. The unusually high Mississippi River discharge in May controls the size of this zone, which will likely be … Read more
The tides are turning in a quest to solve an earthquake mystery. Years ago, scientists realized that earthquakes along mid-ocean ridges – those underwater mountain ranges at the edges of the tectonic plates – are linked with the tides. But nobody could figure out why there’s an uptick in tremors during low tides. “Everyone was … Read more
A study team from the Krasnoyarsk Federal Research Center, Russia, and the National Institute of Aerospace, USA, used current and predicted climate scenarios to examine the climate comfort of Asian Russia and work out the potential for human settlement throughout the 21st century. They published their results today in Environmental Research Letters. At 13 million square kilometres Asian … Read more
Many people have heard of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a vast area of ocean between California and Hawaii where ocean currents concentrate plastic pollution. However, it turns out there may also be a lot of plastic far below the ocean’s surface. A newly-published study in Scientific Reports shows that plastic debris less than 5 millimeters across, … Read more
Plate tectonics is a key geological process on Earth, shaping its surface, and making it unique among the planets in the Solar System. Yet, how plate tectonics emerged and which factors controlled its evolution remains controversial. Now, Stephan V. Sobolev from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ and the University of Potsdam and Michael … Read more
Researchers at Stanford University say they have found an aquatic highway that lets nutrients from Earth’s belly sweep up to surface waters off the coast of Antarctica and stimulate explosive growth of microscopic ocean algae. Their study, published June 5 in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that hydrothermal vents – openings in the seafloor that … Read more