Biologists establish the origin date of the earliest tetrapods and discover they acquired several of the major new adaptive traits that enabled vertebrate life on land at accelerated evolutionary rates. In a study published August 23 in Nature Ecology and Evolution Harvard researchers establish the origin date of the earliest tetrapods and discover they acquired…

The West sees destructive wildfires every year — yet it hadn’t seen anything like the Camp Fire. Three months after the most destructive wildfire in recent history, wildfire sociologists went to the devastated town of Paradise to learn how residents and town leaders were recovering. Edgeley works at the intersection of forest management and sociology,…

Researchers have just elucidated structures of a sugar transport protein that drives transport of sugar in plants. The study provides a comprehensive insight into sugar uptake into plant organs such as flowers, seeds and fruit. Future research can benefit from these discoveries to address challenges like food security through crop improvement. The results are a…

Clouds in the southern hemisphere reflect more sunlight than those in the northern hemisphere. The reason is a more frequent occurrence of liquid water droplets, which results from an interplay between updrafts and a cleaner environment. Covering three years, the measurements in Punta Arenas are the longest dataset on cloud properties obtained with ground-based lidar…

Researchers have for the first time demonstrated a direct link between the decrease in the Dead Sea’s water table, evaporation and land subsidence. The team used a wide range of instruments; from measurement methods based on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to radar satellites and on-site gauge and climate stations. The researchers showed that…

A new study focuses on the 2013 seismic sequence at the Castor platform of a former oil field, about 20 km offshore the coast of Valencia, Spain. During the initial phase of the development of a gas storage facility in the former oil field, thousands of earthquakes with magnitudes below 4.1 took place after the…

The state of Georgia could dramatically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, while creating new jobs and a healthier public, if more of its energy-intensive industries and commercial buildings were to utilize combined heat and power (CHP), according to the latest research. The paper, digitally available now and in print on December 15 in the journal…

Scientists have made important improvements to our understanding of how water moves through and gets stored in dry desert soils by refining an existing computer model. This question led to more questions. «How do solar panels change the way water hits the ground when it rains?» they asked. «Where does the water go? How much…

The bright chirp of the coqui frog, the national symbol of Puerto Rico, has likely resounded through Caribbean forests for at least 29 million years. A fossil arm bone from a frog in the genus Eleutherodactylus is the oldest record of frogs in the Caribbean and, fittingly, was discovered on the island where coquis are…

A new study has found that higher levels of biodiversity — the enormous variety of life on Earth and the species, traits and evolutionary history they represent — appear to reduce extinction risk in birds. Prior research has established that biodiversity is associated with predictable outcomes in the short term: diverse systems are less prone…