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Trees need a certain number of warm days in their growing seasons to grow properly; otherwise, the cell walls of new growth don't lignify properly, creating blue rings that appear when wood samples are dyed.

Scotland must do more to help hydropower facilities maximize their output and prevent negative impacts on wildlife in the face of the challenges posed by climate change, according to a new report.

A research team led by Dr. Tetsuya Muramoto from the Faculty of Science at Toho University has demonstrated the mechanisms by which periodic chemical signal frequencies in cells regulate gene expression via transcription factors and influence the cell fate determination processes. This discovery was made using optogenetic technology, which facilitates the manipulation of biological phenomena using light.

Although fertilizers are essential for global food production, they also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The war in Ukraine has caused supply chain disruptions and price increases. How can fertilizer production become more sustainable and resilient to geopolitical crises?

The ISS's orbit is slowly decaying. While it might seem a permanent fixture in the sky, the orbiting space laboratory is only about 400 km above the planet. There might not be a lot of atmosphere at that altitude. However, there is still some, and interacting with that is gradually slowing the orbital speed of the station, decreasing its orbit, and, eventually, pulling it back to Earth. That is, if we didn't do anything to stop it.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), commonly known as China's "artificial sun," has achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. This accomplishment, reached on Monday, sets a new world record and marks a significant breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion power generation.

Two NASA rocket missions are taking to the Alaskan skies in hopes of discovering why some auroras flicker, others pulsate, and still others are riddled with holes. Understanding these peculiar features is part of NASA's goal to understand the space environment around our planet, which can affect both spacecraft and astronauts.

Urbanization is rapidly transforming landscapes worldwide, becoming a key driver of global biodiversity loss. It often impacts biodiversity negatively by creating selective environments that limit species diversity in urban compared to natural habitats. Amidst this challenge, understanding and enhancing urban blue-green infrastructure is critical.

In the United States, the most well-known skin-penetrating parasitic worm, called a nematode, is the hookworm. But globally, it is estimated that over 600 million people are infected with the skin-penetrating threadworm, also known as Strongyloides stercoralis. This species is found mostly in tropical and subtropical regions with poor sanitation infrastructure. Skin-penetrating nematodes are excreted in the feces of an infected host, and then enter the ground to wait for a new host. When they infect a new host, they can cause serious illnesses.

Topological insulators (TIs) are among the hottest topics in condensed matter physics today. They're a bit strange: Their surfaces conduct electricity, yet their interiors do not, instead acting as insulators. Physicists consider TIs the materials of the future because they host fascinating new quantum phases of matter and have promising technological applications in electronics and quantum computing. Scientists are just now beginning to uncover connections between TIs and magnetism that could unlock new uses for these exotic materials.

This series offers insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks.

Dubai has many images. Being a hub for international research probably isn’t one, yet

What Universal Impact has learnt from a year of producing the Research Reach Roundup newsletter

The latest Independent Social Research Foundation conference heard how refugees have died after becoming trapped at the border between Poland and Belarus

Alfred Hermida: ‘The scholars who write for The Conversation are taking on journalistic practices, guided and mentored by our team of professional journalists’

The Conversation UK, Curtis Brown and Faber are pleased to announce our three judges for The Conversation Prize for writers: Miriam Frankel, senior science editor at The Conversation UK, Priya Atwal, historian…

The 3MT® competition was sponsored by The Conversation’s Universal Impact subsidiary

Our articles are about 4,000 words in length, and have a distinct storytelling style with rounded characters and compelling narrative arcs.

Are you an academic keen to develop a writing career? Do you have a book idea that has the potential to be a nonfiction bestseller? The Conversation Insights, in partnership with talent agency The Curtis…

Getting into a taxi with a stranger at 11pm could be an awkward experience. The Conversation makes things easier though.

The geomorphology of a protected atoll likely contributed to its ability to maintain its shoreline over a turbulent half-century.

From hordes rushing into national parks to mourners holding glacier funerals, tourists wanting to take in threatened natural places may be shifting visitation patterns.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. As Los Angeles recovers from the dreadful wildfires that have destroyed parts of the county, awareness is growing of the potential threat from landslides. The touchstone for these concerns was an interesting […]

Evidence for lithospheric foundering, or the process of denser material sinking into the mantle, is emerging.

Dental office technology is giving scientists a peek inside giant hailstones.

Scientists are tackling “the most profound questions about life itself” with complex computer modeling, billion-year-old bacteria, and old-fashioned fieldwork.

Geoengineering approaches such as stratospheric aerosol injection hold the promise of limiting warming, but among the many potential risks and concerns, their impacts on agriculture remain largely unexplored.

Cyclic changes of fluid pressure in fault zones can induce slow-slip events that advance in the direction of fluid flow, even when the faults are stable.

Emerging consensus on the structure and dynamics of Greenland’s lithosphere may help improve forecasts of climate and sea level change and develop solutions for sustainable resource use.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. News outlets in Australia have extensive coverage of a landslide that occurred on 14 January 2025 on Penny Lane in McCrae, Australia. The landslide destroyed totally a large house. A employee of […]

This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). 2025 has only just begun, but already climate scientists are working hard to unpick what could be in store for us. As greenhouse gas emissions continue to drive more and more climate change, the overall trend is for more global warming. But other factors - like the El Niño oscillation moving towards La Niña - will also have a major impact. So how hot will 2025 be? And how will climate change affect us in the form of extreme weather disasters? Whether that's heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires - like the ones ravaging Los Angeles right now? Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climatead

This is a re-post from the Climate Brink I have a new paper out today in the journal Dialogues on Climate Change exploring both the range of end-of-century climate outcomes in the literature under current policies and the broader move away from high-end emissions scenarios. Current policies are defined broadly as policies in place today and a continuation of trends in technology costs, but no additional climate policy enacted for the remainder of the century. The figure below shows the literature summary I put together (as of fall 2024), which includes estimates of current policy outcomes (in red), outcomes where countries meet their 2030 Paris Agreement nationally determined contributions (in orange), constrained estimates using socioeconomic factors

A listing of 25 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, January 12, 2025 thru Sat, January 18, 2025. This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks! Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Change Impacts Los Angeles burns: What you need to know  This is terrible. This is climate change. by Andrew Dessler, The Climate Brink, Jan 13, 2025

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park from the Gigafact team in collaboration with members from our team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Can CO2 be ignored because it’s just a trace gas? While carbon dioxide is a small part of the atmosphere, it has a large impact on climate as a greenhouse gas. Nitrogen and oxygen make up around 99% of the atmosphere, but neither traps heat. Les

Open access notables Long-term trends in heat wave gaps for the New York City metropolitan area, Lin & Colle, Urban Climate: Heat waves occurring in close succession to one another are hazardous because of the prolonged stress on the human body and energy demand. A heat wave gap metric, the time between two adjacent heat wave events, was utilized to examine the gap length and frequency trend for several stations around New York City (NYC) during the last several decades. From 1961 to 1990 to 1991–2020, the average heat wave gap for the various stations decreased by 15–41 %, the number of short gaps (≤5 days) increased by 33–300 %,

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Asheville, North Carolina, was once widely considered a climate haven thanks to its elevated, inland location and cooler temperatures than much of the Southeast. Then came the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Helene in September 2024. It was a stark reminder that nowhere is safe from climate-worsened extreme weather risks: Hurricanes arriving from the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic seaboard. Hail in the Midwest. Floods in the East. Sea level rise along the coasts. Wildfires in the West, most recently exemplified by the devastating and cos

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters and Bob Henson Flames from the Palisades Fire burn a building at Sunset Boulevard amid a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The fast-moving wildfire had destroyed thousands of structures and burned more than 15,000 acres by Thursday, January 9. (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)

A listing of 23 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, January 5, 2025 thru Sat, January 11, 2025. This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks! Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Change Impacts The Risks of Climate Change to the United States in the 21st Century  CBO assesses how climate change will pose risks to the United States through its effects on economic activity, real estate and financial markets, human health, biodiversity, immigration, and national security. 

Open access notables Large emissions of CO2 and CH4 due to active-layer warming in Arctic tundra, Torn et al., Nature Communications: Climate warming may accelerate decomposition of Arctic soil carbon, but few controlled experiments have manipulated the entire active layer. To determine surface-atmosphere fluxes of carbon dioxide and methane under anticipated end-of-century warming, here we used heating rods to warm (by 3.8 °C) to the depth of permafrost in polygonal tundra in Utqia?vik (formerly Barrow), Alaska and measured fluxes over two growing seasons. We show that e

This is a re-post from the Climate Brink Global surface temperatures have risen around 1.3C since the preindustrial (1850-1900) period as a result of human activity.1 However, this aggregate number masks a lot of underlying factors that contribute to global surface temperature changes over time. These include CO2, which is the primary driver of long-term warming, as well as non-CO2 greenhouse gases like CH4, N2O, and halocarbons. But it also includes planet-cooling aerosols that have masked a sizable portion of the warming of our greenhouse gas emissions