A groundbreaking study has revealed that small but mighty zooplankton — including copepods, krill, and salps — are key players in the Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb and store carbon. Led by an international team of researchers, and published in Limnology and Oceanography, the study quantifies for the first time how these tiny creatures collectively…
The Cambrian explosion was an extraordinary phenomenon in the evolution of life on the planet that led to the emergence of many animal phyla and the diversification of species. During this period, some 530 million years ago, most of the basic body plans of organisms that have survived to the present day emerged. However, this…
Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka scientists have discovered that it takes mere minutes for a species of sex-changing fish to develop dominant behavior after a change in the pecking order. The new study led by the Department of Anatomy and published on Proceedings of the Royal Society B, examines the New Zealand spotty, or paketi, a fish…
The central estimate of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C is 130 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) (from the beginning of 2025). This would be exhausted in a little more than three years at current levels of CO2 emissions, according to the latest Indicators of Global Climate Change study published today in the journal…
Lake of Darkness is the New Scientist Book Club’s July pick You were born, in all likelihood, towards the end of the 20th– or towards the beginning of the 21st-centuries. Yes? I have no desire to condescend to you. Many of the features of life today will be readily comprehensible to you, if you can…
Getty Images Tuvalu is the world’s second lowest-lying country More than a third of Tuvalu citizens have entered the ballot for a world-first climate visa which would allow them to permanently migrate to Australia. Opening for the first intake on 16 June, the influx of registrations could indicate that programme will be hugely oversubscribed, with…
Optical biosensors use light waves as a probe to detect molecules, and are essential for precise medical diagnostics, personalized medicine, and environmental monitoring. Their performance is dramatically enhanced if they can focus light waves down to the nanometer scale – small enough to detect proteins or amino acids, for example – using nanophotonic structures that…
An interdisciplinary team of experts in green chemistry, engineering and physics at Flinders University in Australia has developed a safer and more sustainable approach to extract and recover gold from ore and electronic waste. Explained in the leading journal Nature Sustainability, the gold-extraction technique promises to reduce levels of toxic waste from mining and shows…
A fireball captured on a dashcam in South Carolina Kathryn Rose Farr via Facebook Sightings of a fireball streaking down from the sky were reported by eyewitnesses in several south-eastern US states on the afternoon of 26 June. The American Meteor Society’s website has logged at least 142 reports about the fireball event from observers…
Some ash trees have genetic variants that confer partial resistance to ash dieback FLPA / Alamy Ash trees in the UK are rapidly evolving resistance in response to ash dieback disease, DNA sequencing of hundreds of trees has shown. The finding is good news, says Richard Buggs at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the…
