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.
Chemical signatures imprinted on tiny stones that form inside the ears of fish show that two of Alaska’s most productive salmon populations, and the fisheries they support, depend on the entire watershed. Sockeye and Chinook salmon born in the Nushagak River and its network of streams and lakes in southwest Alaska use the whole basin … Read more
In the future, small, fast-lived, highly-fertile, insect-eating animals, which can thrive in a wide-variety of habitats, will predominate. These ‘winners’ include rodents, such as dwarf gerbil – and songbirds, such as the white-browed sparrow-weaver. Less adaptable, slow-lived species, requiring specialist environmental conditions, will likely fall victim of extinction. These ‘losers’ include the tawny eagle and … Read more
Tiger sharks have a reputation for being the “garbage cans of the sea”–they’ll eat just about anything, from dolphins and sea turtles to rubber tires. But before these top predators grow to their adult size of 15 feet, young tiger sharks have an even more unusual diet. Scientists have just announced in a new paper … Read more
The latest research from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), published today in the journal Nature Communications, reveals the considerable consequences of an innocuous national pastime. Britain’s growing love affair with feeding the birds has significantly altered the composition of our garden bird communities over the past 40 years, helping the populations of some species … Read more
Fishing gears that are highly prevalent throughout the tropical seas, but largely hidden from fisheries management and the conservation radar, are creating large scale social, ecological and economic damage, threatening marine biodiversity and human livelihoods throughout the tropical seas. [rand_post] Research published this week in the journal Nature Communications reveals that the use of ‘fish … Read more
In countless grade-school science textbooks, the Earth’s mantle is a yellow-to-orange gradient, a nebulously defined layer between the crust and the core. To geologists, the mantle is so much more than that. It’s a region that lives somewhere between the cold of the crust and the bright heat of the core. It’s where the ocean … Read more
The study, published in Nature Sustainability on May 20, describes a potential process for converting the extremely potent greenhouse gas methane into carbon dioxide, which is a much less potent driver of global warming. The idea of intentionally releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere may seem surprising, but the authors argue that swapping methane for carbon dioxide … Read more
The study led by IMAS researcher Dr Jennifer Lavers and published in the journal Scientific Reports estimated beaches on the Indian Ocean islands are littered with 238 tonnes of plastic, including 977 000 shoes and 373 000 toothbrushes. Dr Lavers’ research made headlines around the world when in May 2017 she revealed that beaches on … Read more
In and around the tangled roots of the forest floor, fungi and bacteria grow with trees, exchanging nutrients for carbon in a vast, global marketplace. A new effort to map the most abundant of these symbiotic relationships – involving more than 1.1 million forest sites and 28,000 tree species – has revealed factors that determine … Read more
The team, led by the University of Cambridge, found that as temperatures increase, trees grow faster, but they also tend to die younger. When these fast-growing trees die, the carbon they store is returned to the carbon cycle. The results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, have implications for global carbon cycle dynamics. As the Earth’s … Read more