A new study indicates that the number of species grew when global temperatures increased during periods in the geologic past. But that may not matter when it comes to rapid, man-made climate change.
New study suggests that huge amounts of the greenhouse gas methane could be hiding underneath the ice of Antarctica.
We live in a world obsessed with numbers – college rankings, baseball scores, exam results – and now we have one to tell us what’s happening to our oceans.
You are not alone – ever. All day, every day, you’re in the company of millions of other creatures, even when there’s not another soul in sight. More unsettling still, those unseen others live inside you.
The invisible population that calls you home is known as your microbiome — the millions of nonhuman cells that populate …
EcocentricEcocentric
It’s usually a bad idea to generalize too much about anything – particularly science, where different selection pressures and environmental one-offs can tweak a basic model into something quite out of the ordinary. Take sea …
EcocentricOceans
Earth history is different from ordinary history: it’s much harder to nail down specific dates when everything happened millions of years ago and over huge, slow timescales. But it can be done, as shown by paleontologists who …
EcocentricOceans
If you’re already daydreaming about your winter getaway to the tropics as the weather gets crisper and gloomier, consider adjusting your plans to include some swimming among the world’s coral reefs – not just because they offer an unparalleled panorama of underwater life, but also because they’re disappearing in the midst of …
EcocentricWeather
Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was …
EcocentricWaste
Given how the cracks in our food system have recently expanded into troubling chasms – remember the ground turkey Salmonella scare, and the emergence of an antibiotic-resistant Salmonella strain – health experts are once again fretting about farms and the drugs used in them. And with good reason. Antibiotics may be some of the …
EcocentricWildlife
It’s easy enough to get the public interested in the great apes when you plaster James Franco’s handsome face on a movie poster and promise visual effects on the level of Lord of the Rings and King Kong. But these animals get other types of attention too – the wrong kind. On Sunday a baby mountain gorilla named Ihirwe was …
