Source:
Earth
Can biodiversity help protect ecosystems from extreme conditions? That question is much on the minds of scientists and policy makers as a changing climate brings more wildly swinging conditions at the same time human activities reduce the number of species available to produce food and oxygen and help keep our planet in balance.
Now, a study of 46 grasslands in North America and Europe points to a promising answer: Increasing plant diversity decreases the extent to which extremely wet or dry conditions disrupt grassland productivity.
Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But this is precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition from a dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.
New University of Washington research suggests that subsurface warming could be causing more methane gas to bubble up off the Washington and Oregon coast.
BINGHAMTON, NY - Binghamton University researchers have demonstrated an eco-friendly process that enables unprecedented spatial control over the electrical properties of graphene oxide. This two-dimensional nanomaterial has the potential to revolutionize flexible electronics, solar cells and biomedical instruments.
After a two-year hiatus, the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, began its second run of experiments in June, smashing together subatomic particles at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) -- the highest energy ever achieved in a laboratory. Physicists hope that such high-energy collisions may produce completely new particles, and potentially simulate the conditions that were seen in the early universe.
FROSTSBURG, MD (October 14, 2015)--A new study shows that surface water temperature in the Chesapeake Bay is increasing more rapidly than air temperature, signaling a need to look at the impact of warming waters on one of the largest and most productive estuaries in the world. The study, completed by Haiyong Ding and Andrew Elmore of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Appalachian Laboratory, was published in the October issue of Remote Sensing of Environment.