Earth

Four of the most common mosquito pesticides used along the east and Gulf coasts show little risk to juvenile hard clams and oysters, according to a NOAA study.

However, the study, published in the on-line journal Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, also determined that lower oxygen levels in the water, known as hypoxia, and increased acidification actually increased how toxic some of the pesticides were. Such climate variables should be considered when using these pesticides in the coastal zone, the study concluded.

DURHAM, N.H. – For more than 40 years, policy makers have been working to reduce acid rain, a serious environmental problem that can devastate lakes, streams, and forests and the plants and animals that live in these ecosystems. Now new research funded by the NH Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES) at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture indicates that lakes in New England and the Adirondack Mountains are recovering rapidly from the effects of acid rain.

Understanding how clouds affect the climate has been a difficult proposition. What controls the makeup of the low clouds that cool the atmosphere or the high ones that trap heat underneath? How does human activity change patterns of cloud formation? The research of the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Ilan Koren suggests we may be nudging cloud formation in the direction of added area and height.

BATON ROUGE – Animals incorporate a number of unique methods for detecting prey, but for the Japanese sea catfish, Plotosus japonicus, it is especially tricky given the dark murky waters where it resides.

John Caprio, George C. Kent Professor of Biological Sciences at LSU, and colleagues from Kagoshima University in Japan have identified that these fish are equipped with sensors that can locate prey by detecting slight changes in the water's pH level.

One of the biggest riddles in physics is the apparent imbalance between matter and antimatter in our universe. To date, there is no explanation as to why matter and antimatter failed to completely annihilate one another immediately after the big bang and how the surplus matter was created that went on to form the universe as we know it. Experiments conducted at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have contributed towards a resolution of this problem. For the first time a direct and high-precision measurement of the magnetic moment of the proton has been conducted successfully.

Surface catalysts are notoriously difficult to study mechanistically, but scientists at the University of South Carolina and Rice University have shown how to get real-time reaction information from Ag nanocatalysts that have long frustrated attempts to describe their kinetic behavior in detail.

Reducing deforestation in the tropics would significantly cut the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere – by as much as one-fifth – research shows.

In the first study of its kind, scientists have calculated the amount of carbon absorbed by the world's tropical forests and the amounts of greenhouse gas emissions created by loss of trees, as a result of human activity.