By Scott Schrage 19 April 2018 (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) – Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size — by way of extinction — at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published in the journal Science.Elephant-dwarfing wooly mammoths, elephant-sized ground […]
By Jeremy Berke 25 April 2018 (Business Insider) – President Donald Trump announced the reduction of two national monuments in Utah in December 2017. Bears Ears was reduced by 85 percent in the months that followed, in the largest acreage reduction of a national monument to date. Trump also cut Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in […]
By Jeff Tollefson 19 April 2018 (Nature) – Grasslands in warm and dry climates could grow faster as carbon dioxide levels rise, according to data from a long-term ecological field experiment in Minnesota. The finding, which runs counter to long-established ideas about how plants will respond to the greenhouse gas, suggests that grasslands could provide […]
By John W. Fitzpatrick and Nathan R. Senner 27 April 2018 (The New York Times) – A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions. These declines […]
19 Apr 2018 (James Cook University) – A new study published online today in Nature shows that corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef experienced a catastrophic die-off following the extended marine heatwave of 2016.“When corals bleach from a heatwave, they can either survive and regain their colour slowly as the temperature drops, or they […]
By Melia Robinson 22 April 2018 (Busniess Insider) – A small island smack in the middle of the South Pacific has never been inhabited by people — and yet, its white sand beaches are home to more than 37 million pieces of junk.Every day on Henderson Island — one of the most remote places on […]
By Seth Borenstein 16 April 2018 (PhysOrg) – Global warming is screwing up nature’s intricately timed dinner hour, often making hungry critters and those on the menu show up at much different times, a new study shows.Timing is everything in nature. Bees have to be around and flowers have to bloom at the same time […]
By Oliver Milman 22 April 2018 Utqiaġvik, Alaska (The Guardian) – Last July, Nagruk Harcharek was savouring a bucolic visit to a cabin that sits on the lip of the Chipp river, deep in the Alaskan Arctic, when something caught his eye. Shimmering on a rack where he hangs his caught whitefish to dry was, […]
24 April 2018 (AWI) – Experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have recently found higher amounts of microplastic in arctic sea ice than ever before. However, the majority of particles were microscopically small. The ice samples from five regions throughout the Arctic Ocean contained up to 12,000 […]
By Quirin Schiermeier 18 April 2018 (Nature) – Extreme heat in 2016 damaged Australia’s Great Barrier Reef much more substantially than initial surveys indicated, according to ongoing studies that have tracked the health of the coral treasure. The heatwave caused massive bleaching of the corals that captured worldwide attention.In a paper published on 18 April […]
