science wire

UC Berkeley herpetologist Jim McGuire was slogging through the rain forests of Indonesia's Sulawesi Island one night this past summer when he grabbed what he thought was a male frog and found himself juggling not only a frog but also dozens of slippery, newborn tadpoles.

Imperial has launched an exciting new bursary scheme for women scientists thanks to the legacy of pioneering alumnus Dr Greta Stevenson.

ESA Space in Images Title Great Bahamas Bank Released 19/12/2014 10:00 am Copyright USGS/ESA Description Underwater structures of the Great Bahamas Bank are pictured in this image from the Landsat-8 satellite on 5 February.

18 December 2014 This latest release from the camera on ESA's Mars Express is a simulated flight over the Becquerel crater, showing large-scale deposits of sedimentary material.

A major new decade-long experiment to study the impact of climate and environmental change on woodlands took a step closer to reality this week as planning permission was granted by Stafford Borough Council to the University of Birmingham. The Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) field facility, which has been made possible thanks to a transformational £15 million donation to the University, will be created in Mill Haft Wood in Norbury, Staffordshire.

Zach Barkley, then a research assistant, attaches a GPS device and an intake tube to the roof of the research team's car before heading out on the rural roads of Pennsylvania.

Queensland Fire and Emergency Services (QFES), The University of Queensland and the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) are undertaking an Australian-first research project to study bushfires in an effort to better protect lives and property.

The Atlantic Ocean at mid-depths may have given out early warning signals, 1,000 years in advance, that the last Ice Age was going to end. Scientists had previously known that at the end of the last Ice Age, around 14,700 years ago, major changes occurred to the Atlantic Ocean in a period known as the Bolling-Allerod interval.

A decade after the Boxing Day tsunami wiped out seaside villages across Aceh, the Indonesian province is still suffering major problems.

Research associate Zach Barkley attaches a GPS device and an intake tube to the roof of the research team's car before heading out on the rural roads of Pennsylvania.

Many of the worst West Coast winter floods pack a double punch. Heavy rains and melting snow wash down the mountains together to breach riverbanks, wash out roads and flood buildings.

16 December 2014 ESA's Venus Express has ended its eight-year mission after far exceeding its planned life.

The highest concentration of carbon in parts of Amazonia is not stored in trees, but below the ground as peat, according to new University of Leeds research. Mapping and quantifying carbon stored in the largest area of peatland forest in Amazonia, a geological basin almost the size of England, the researchers estimated that more than three billion tonnes of carbon is stored within this ecosystem.

New research into an Icelandic eruption has shed light on how the Earth's crust forms, according to a paper published today in Nature. When the Bárðarbunga volcano, which is buried beneath Iceland’s Vatnajökull ice cap, reawakened in August 2014, scientists had a rare opportunity to monitor how the magma flowed through cracks in the rock away from the volcano.

No visit to Rome is complete without a visit to the Pantheon, Trajan's Markets, the Colosseum, or the other spectacular examples of ancient Roman concrete monuments that have stood the test of time and the elements for nearly two thousand years. A key discovery to understanding the longevity and endurance of Roman architectural concrete has been made by an international and interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers using beams of X-rays at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

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Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid more than five miles wide smashed into the Earth at 70,000 miles per hour, instantly vaporizing upon impact. The strike obliterated most terrestrial life, including the dinosaurs, in a geological instant: Heavy dust blocked out the sun, setting off a cataclysmic chain of events from the bottom of the food chain to the top, killing off more than three-quarters of Earth's species - or so the popular theory goes.

Stanford researcher Daniel Swain said the upcoming rainstorms this week - among the largest in recent years - will provide a short-term respite to California's drought, by far the state's most intense in the historical record.

Curiosity rover reveals the role played by large lakes in forming Martian mountain. In 2012, NASA landed a robotic vehicle called Curiosity on Mars, in a crater 96 miles in diameter, dubbed Gale Crater. The vehicle has since been driving around and gathering data that is helping researchers to learn more about Mars' past habitability.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Understanding of the Critical Zone , which stretches from tree tops to the deepest fresh groundwater - the place where rock, soil, water, air and living organisms interact and shape Earth's surface - will get a needed boost funded by a $1.35 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Earlier this fall, a team led by Stanford geophysicist Rosemary Knight performed an ambitious experiment to determine the extent of ocean saltwater intrusion into underground freshwater in the Monterey Bay region.

Researchers at the EPICentre Research Group, a multidisciplinary research group based in UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering (CEGE) that investigates risk to society and infrastructur

Title Romania Released 05/12/2014 10:00 am Copyright Copernicus data/ESA (2014) Description This image of Romania - with the political borders in red - is a mosaic of 15 scans by Sentinel-1A's radar in October and November.

Probably not, but Alan Rubin is frequently educating the public about where meteorites actually come from Alan Rubin The UCLA Meteorite Gallery displays this 357-pound iron chunk of an asteroid that crashed into Arizona nearly 50,000 years ago, creating a mile-wide crater.

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2 December 2014 Radar images from the Sentinel-1A satellite are helping to monitor ground movements of the recently erupted Fogo volcano.

Today's atmosphere likely bears little trace of its primordial self: Geochemical evidence suggests that Earth's atmosphere may have been completely obliterated at least twice since its formation more than 4 billion years ago. However, it's unclear what interplanetary forces could have driven such a dramatic loss.

Press release issued: 1 December 2014 University of Bristol scientist, Dr Laura Robinson is one of five European Research Council (ERC) grantees who have been invited to speak at TEDx Brussels today [1 December].

Australia's first mobile weather radar has been enlisted by University of Queensland researchers to track some of the country's most dangerous summer storms. In a bid to improve the accuracy of storm forecasting, UQ's Geographical Sciences PhD student Joshua Soderholm and his team intend to put thunderstorms under intense scrutiny to better understand what drives them.

Laguna del Maule, Chile, is at the center of a volcanic field that has erupted 36 times during the last 25,000 years, and is now experiencing significant uplift due to magma intrusion.

27 November 2014 Thanks to a break in the dusty 'weather' over the giant Hellas Basin at the beginning of this year, ESA's Mars Express was able to look down into the seven kilometre-deep basin and onto the frosty surface of Hellas Chaos.

Using state-of-the-art computer models maintained at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, researchers determined that El Niño has intensified over the last 6,000 years. This pier and cafe are in Ocean Beach, California. Photo: Jon Sullivan It was fishermen off the coast of Peru who first recognized the anomaly, hundreds of years ago.

Early one morning last January, MIT undergraduate Theresa Oehmke was eating breakfast at the Kilauea Military Camp on Hawaii's Big Island when a colleague burst into the room, yelling, "Oh my god, th

Follow the opening of the 5th International GOCE User Workshop from the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France, via live webstream on 25 November.

Dan Berger is an assistant professor in the UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and author of the new book, " Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era.

A quiet subtext to this latest deal with Iran is the role of the Texas oil industry as enabler and potential victim of the agreement.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station photographed this view of Pavlof Volcano in the Aleutian Arc of Alaska on May 18, 2013.

An international team of researchers has shown that it may be possible to improve the effectiveness of the seasonal flu vaccine by 'pre-empting' the evolution of the influenza virus.

A team of researchers from Caltech and the China Earthquake Administration has discovered an ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalayas. The geologists say that the ancient canyon-thousands of feet deep in places-effectively rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalayas became so steep, so fast.

ANN ARBOR-In a study that identifies a new, "direct fingerprint" of human activity on Earth, scientists have found that agricultural crops play a big role in seasonal swings of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The new findings from Boston University, the University of Michigan and other institutions reveal a nuance in the carbon cycle that could help scientists understand and predict how Earth's vegetation will react as the globe warms.

Deforestation is both a boon and a bane for wetlands, according to new research by The University of Queensland. The study found that human impacts on the environment, such as deforestation, do not always have negative consequences, and can provide positive outcomes for biodiversity. Study author Dr Craig Woodward, from UQ's School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management , said many wetlands of international importance were formed or expanded in response to human clearance of forests.

Today's climate models predict a 50 percent increase in lightning strikes across the United States during this century as a result of warming temperatures associated with climate change.

Today's climate models predict a 50 percent increase in lightning strikes across the United States during this century as a result of warming temperatures associated with climate change.

Infant planetary systems are usually nothing more than swirling disks of gas and dust. Over the course of a few million years, this gas gets sucked into the center of the disk to build a star, while the remaining dust accumulates into larger and larger chunks - the building blocks for terrestrial planets.

Michigan engineers are deeply involved in the historic Rosetta mission that, for the first time in human history, landed a spacecraft on a comet today.

Our structure (research) Impact of our research Postgraduate research 12 Nov 2014 Major new piece of research outlines the role gas will play as a 'bridging fuel' to a low-carbon economy, but warns that it won't be long before gas becomes part of the problem rather than the solution.

During the past few weeks, millions of people around the Gulf of Mexico have experienced the fury of Mother Nature.