News by Subject Earth Science

Wildfires don't stop being dangerous after the flames go out. Even one modest rainfall after a fire can cause a deadly landslide, according to new UC Riverside research.

NOAA published a peer-reviewed State of the Monument report jointly produced by the co-trustees of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. The report includes information on the status and trends of living resources, habitats, ocean conditions, maritime and cultural archaeological resources, and the human activities and natural events that affect them.

Since the 1950s, "Africanized" honeybees have spread north and south across the Americas until apparently coming to a halt in California and northern Argentina. Now genome sequencing of hundreds of bees from the northern and southern limits shows a gradual decline in African ancestry across hundreds of miles, rather than an abrupt shift.

The "mismatch hypothesis" argues that our bodies evolved to digest the foods that our ancestors ate, and that human bodies will struggle and largely fail to metabolize a radically new set of foods. This intuitive idea is hard to test directly, but the Turkana, a pastoralist population in remote Kenya, present a natural experiment: genetically homogenous populations whose diets stretch across a lifestyle gradient from relatively "matched" to extremely "mismatched" with their recent evolutionary history.

Researcher makes 'little data' act big through, the application of mathematical techniques normally used for time-series, to spatial processes. The study, 'An information-theoretic approach to study spatial dependencies in small datasets,' featured on the cover of Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Climate change pushes species distribution areas northward. However, the expansion of species ranges is not self-evident due to e.g. habitat degradation and unsustainable harvesting caused by human activities. A new study led from the University of Turku, Finland, suggests that protected areas can facilitate wintering waterbird adaptation to climate warming by advancing their range shifts towards north.

Humans are not the only beings that can identify rules in complex language-like constructions -- monkeys and great apes can do so, too, a study at the University of Zurich has shown. Researchers at the Department of Comparative Language Science of UZH used a series of experiments based on an 'artificial grammar' to conclude that this ability can be traced back to our ancient primate ancestors.