Green & indigenous News

Researchers have shed new light on the features that enable tree-dwelling mammals to move effectively through their environments, providing insights into the evolution of the distinct upright postures seen in primates. The study, published in eLife, is the first to compare upward and downward climbing behaviors across a broad range of tree-dwelling (arboreal) mammal species. eLife's editors describe the work as valuable, with convincing analyses that will be of interest to biologists studying animal movement.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

New research from the University of Copenhagen suggests that volcanic eruptions during the Ice Age may have triggered sudden climate change by disrupting the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), causing temperatures to fluctuate between hot and cold for thousands of years. The study contributes missing pieces to our understanding of what could cause Northern Europe's radiator to shut down.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

An international team featuring faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York has drilled the longest ever sediment core from under an ice sheet, providing a record stretching back millions of years that will help climate scientists forecast the fate of the ice sheet in our warming world.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

Earlier this month, a team of conservationists translocated 16 critically endangered banteng into Siem Pang Wildlife Sanctuary in northeast Cambodia in a bid to boost numbers that had dwindled to critical levels. The group of wild cattle was captured and transported from a nearby unprotected forest facing imminent conversion to farmland. The operation was the second phase of largescale efforts to save the herd, led by Cambodia-based social enterprise Rising Phoenix in partnership with local wildlife authorities. “With proper law enforcement, no poaching and suitable habitat in Siem Pang, I think there is a very positive future for them,” said Romain Legrand, biodiversity research and monitoring manager with Rising Phoenix. “The population is going to grow quickly, I’m sure.” Together with the first translocation carried out in May 2025, the recent operation brings the total rehomed banteng (Bos javanicus) population in the reserve to 32 individuals, including breeding-age adults and calves, according to Legrand. Banteng are strikingly patterned bovids, their bright white legs and snowy rumps contrasting sharply against their russet coats. The species used to range across Southeast Asia, with Cambodia’s once-extensive dry dipterocarp forests home to a significant portion of the global population. However, decades of deforestation and hunting for their meat, horns and hides have decimated their numbers — the latest IUCN Red List assessment puts their global population at no more than 8,000 individuals. In Cambodia, the species hangs on as sporadic groups eking out an existence in a handful of isolated forest patches. While tigers…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

What types of photos make people reach for their wallets? New Stanford University-led research suggests that brain activity can help forecast which wildlife images will inspire people to engage online and donate to conservation causes.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

Researchers have found more evidence that microplastics are impacting freshwater wildlife in different countries around the world. A new study, led by the University of Glasgow and published in the journal Environmental Research, documents the presence of microplastics in the droppings of freshwater birds nesting in different sites in Europe. The results shed more light on the extent of the impact of microplastics on the natural environment.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

“Spekboom is everywhere, it’s all anyone talks about … what used to be an Angora goat farming town is now a spekboom town,” says field ecologist Rae Attridge. In the past two years, Nat Carbon, the carbon project developer Attridge works for, has planted 10,000 hectares (nearly 25,000 acres) of spekboom in the Klein Karoo, a semidesert region of South Africa. Their work is the first phase of an effort to restore 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of degraded land on five farms near Jansenville in Eastern Cape province. The company is one of more than 60 entities carrying out spekboom thicket restoration projects across 800,000 hectares (2 million acres), all loosely tied up under what the United Nations calls the Thicket Restoration Movement. The Subtropical Thicket Restoration Programme was started in 2004 by the South African government with $8 million of funding intended to catalyze large-scale investment into thicket restoration efforts in the region. These were the first green shoots of a growing collection of projects now recognized by the U.N. In 2009, researchers had planted spekboom (Porticularia afra) on 331 quarter-hectare plots scattered across over roughly 7.5 million hectares (18.5 million acres) of the biome to evaluate the potential for restoration. These earlier experiments found that thicker stems would increase survival rates, but watering at planting time had a negligible impact. It also found that animals, both wild and domestic, easily found their way to these small poorly protected plots. An Angora goat in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Each year, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the reason that more than a million people die from infections that no longer respond to existing antibiotics, making AMR one of the greatest global health challenges of our time.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

This article is part of an ongoing series of stories by ICT examining the complicated issues of Indigenous identity.

Nika Bartoo-Smith
Underscore Native News+ ICT

Native nations have stepped up to provide their tribal citizens with proper documentation through tribal ID pop-ups with the escalating immigration raids and more reports of Native people being questioned, detained or arrested. However, it has many Native people asking if blood quantum should be a tribal citizenship criteria, as many Native people need it to obtain a tribal ID.

The irony of Indigenous peoples having to guard against being questioned about U.S. citizenship by a government created by European immigrants is not lost to people across Indian Country.

The increased immigration enforcement raids now impacting Native people are tied to the accepted use of racial profiling by ICE to determine citizenship status, said Matthew Fletcher, a federal Indian law professor at the University of Michigan.

In the 2025 Supreme Court case Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Supreme Court voted to support the continued use of racial profiling by immigration agents.

“People are arrested because they look brown, and it’s irrelevant to the ICE agent whether or not that person is a citizen or not,” said Fletcher, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. He also runs the blog Turtle Talk, which focuses on legal issues impacting Indian Country.

As Native nations think about how to protect their tribal citizens in the face of immigration detention, the question of how tribes support their descendants has also come up.

Tribal descendants are individuals who can trace direct lineal ancestry to an enrolled member of a Native nation, but may not be eligible for enrollment themselves due to certain requirements, such as blood quantum. Many of the 575 federally recognized tribes in the US use blood quantum to determine citizenship.The blood quantum for enrollment ends at one-quarter for many tribes. It is a controversial way of tracking ancestry introduced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In Minneapolis, Red Lake Nation descendant and US citizen Jose Ramirez was dragged out of his car and detained by immigration agents in early January. He is now being charged with assaulting an ICE agent during detainment.

In response to cases like Ramirez’s some tribes, like the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, have notified their citizens that they will reimburse the fees for them to obtain U.S. passport books and cards as well as REAL ID identification cards and driver’s licenses.

Native nations across the country have also begun hosting tribal ID pop-ups for citizens to obtain their tribal IDs for free.

There are reports of some nations that are also providing descendancy letters for first and second generation descendants at these pop-ups. Some of the nations providing these include the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, the White Earth Nation and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

“Tribal descendants are in a tough spot because they lack tribal citizenship. They should keep any state identification, a photo of their birth certificate, and any U.S. passport on them at all times, as well as any federal CDIB [Certificate of Degree of Indian or Alaska Native Blood] card they may have,” Gabe Galanda, a citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and founder of Indigenous rights law firm Galanda Broadman, told Underscore Native News + ICT.

He added that people who have been disenrolled from their tribe should also keep all forms of identification with them at all times.

“These forms of identification can help rebut any alleged reasonable suspicion or probable cause by ICE for an individual’s detention or arrest,” he said.

Legal experts have weighed in on the question of how to support descendants, noting that it is a much broader issue rooted in bigger conversations about the use of blood quantum to determine citizenship status.

“Perhaps this is a serious moment for tribal leadership to begin thinking about what it really means to live by the colonizer’s definition of ‘Indianness,’” Fletcher said. “Many tribal leaders I know — and many, many Native people — have accepted blood quantum as a proxy for identity. There is such a ridiculous number of Indigenous peoples who are not eligible for citizenship with their tribal nation due to blood quantum — people who speak the language, participate in the ceremonies, work for the tribe, live in tribal public housing, engage in treaty hunting and fishing, receive health care, and so on.”

Fletcher noted that not all Native nations use blood quantum to determine citizenship status, such as the Cherokee Nation which uses the Dawes Rolls. “To be eligible for Cherokee Nation citizenship, a person must have one or more direct ancestors listed on Dawes,” the nation’s tribal registration website states.

Beyond that, Fletcher said some nations have taken steps to legally render every tribal citizen 100 percent Indian as a matter of tribal law.

“What that does is it opens up the possibility that people could, who are currently first or second generation descendants that are excluded from tribal membership, enroll that way,” Fletcher said.

While many legal experts do advise carrying identification, there are many reports that even when people stopped by immigration agents are carrying valid identification, that may not always be enough.

Fearing ICE, Native Americans rush to prove their right to belong in the US

In mid-January Peter Yazzie, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, was stopped by immigration enforcement agents on his way to work. He told ABC15 that he tried to show multiple forms of identification — including his Certificate of Indian Blood, a driver’s licence, and a birth certificate — but he was still detained.

In early November, Umatilla actress Elaine Miles was questioned by immigration agents, who then called her tribal ID “fake.” This is just one example of many reports of immigration agents not accepting tribal IDs, even though they are legally required to.

“I don’t think any identification matters to an ICE agent at the moment,” Fletcher said. “You could show them a birth certificate, you could be carrying one around your neck. They won’t care. They’re still going to arrest you, and all they have to do is say that’s fake. But that said, I think it’s really important that people read the guidance on what to do in case you are confronted with law enforcement.”

Jeremiah Chin, an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington, whose recent publications focus on the intersections of race, law, and Indigeneity, suggested that Native nations should set up hotlines and other connections to legal support networks to be easily accessible for their community members in case they are stopped by immigration agents.

In January, the National Congress of American Indians and the Native American Rights Fund hosted a “Know Your Rights” webinar about what to do in case of a potential encounter with immigration agents. More than 1,000 people from across the country registered for the virtual event.

The post Tribal IDs for descendants in the age of Trump’s ICE appeared first on ICT.

From ICT via This RSS Feed.

Every living organism has its own genetic "blueprint": the source code for how it grows, functions and reproduces. This blueprint is known as a genome. When scientists sequence a genome, they identify and put in order the chemical building blocks—adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G) nucleotides—that make up an organism's DNA.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

When you look out across a snowy winter landscape, it might seem like nature is fast asleep. Yet, under the surface, tiny organisms are hard at work, consuming the previous year's dead plant material and other organic matter.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Look at the armpits—or, technically, the "wingpits. That's what Scott Mehus, education director at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Minn., told a group of bird watchers recently as they prepared to scan the winter skies for a majestic raptor that's especially tricky to identify: the golden eagle.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Nucleotide synthesis—the production of the basic components of DNA and RNA—is essential for cell growth and division. In most animal cells, this process depends closely on properly functioning mitochondria, the organelles responsible for respiration and energy production. When mitochondrial respiration fails—a common feature of mitochondrial diseases and several forms of cancer—cells lose the ability to proliferate normally. A new study published in Nature Metabolism now shows that this dependence is not irreversible.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Tropical forests help to generate vast amounts of rainfall each year, adding weight to arguments for protecting them as water and climate pressures increase, say researchers. A new study led by the University of Leeds has put a monetary value on one of forests' least recognized services as a source of rainfall to surrounding regions, finding that each hectare generates 2.4 million liters of rain each year—enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

When it comes to government spending, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is taking a cue from the Trump administration.

As his second term nears its end, DeSantis is spearheading a campaign to slash property taxes, which provide around 30 percent of local government revenue. He’s also looking to dramatically pare down state-funded programs, and he’s commissioned a state-level version of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” to do so. DeSantis’s DOGE will be run by his hand-picked chief financial officer, the creator of a YouTube show called “Government Gone Wild.” In a signal of his seriousness about cutting spending, the governor’s proposed budget for this year is 10 percent lower than his 2019 budget in inflation-adjusted and per-capita terms.

To make these cuts happen, the Sunshine State’s climate programs are in the crosshairs.

The DOGE report that the governor’s office published last month singled out local efforts to confront climate change as examples of the “irresponsible spending” that Florida must end. The state task force targeted Jacksonville’s efforts to purchase electric vehicles, St. Petersburg’s hiring of a “sustainability and resilience officer,” and Miami’s efforts to build out buses and rail systems. The report directed specific ire at Palm Beach County’s Office of Resilience, which had a mandate to “reduce resident, business, and natural resource vulnerability” to disasters that “include flooding, more frequent and intense storms, extreme heat, [and] saltwater intrusion.”

DeSantis’s DOGE justified this criticism by appealing to a controversial report from the federal Department of Energy, which concluded that “scientific evidence does not support claims of a long-term increase in so-called ‘extreme’ weather events, including hurricanes, tornadoes, [and] floods.” Yet laws signed by DeSantis himself take the opposite view — and, perhaps as a result, the state’s largest climate resilience program is proving itself immune to the governor’s purge.

During his first term as governor, DeSantis inaugurated a grant program known as “Resilient Florida,” which doles out millions of dollars a year to ward off flooding and sea level rise. The statute authorizing the program even “recognizes that the state is particularly vulnerable to adverse impacts from flooding resulting from increases in frequency and duration of rainfall events, storm surge from more frequent and severe weather systems, and sea level rise.” It requires that the state conduct a regular assessment of these threats.

In the five years since its inception, the Resilient Florida program has become one of the country’s most robust climate adaptation programs — rivaling not only those of any other state but also federal resilience efforts spearheaded by FEMA. Florida has distributed well over $1 billion in resilience money to local governments who then match the funding. By comparison, FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program has distributed around $5 billion to the entire country.

Resilient Florida has funded the construction of “living shorelines” to prevent erosion at the Pensacola naval base and the relocation of an island wastewater treatment plant in Fort Pierce to prevent flooding during high tide events. Palm Beach County, the same jurisdiction that Florida’s DOGE singled out for criticism, has received tens of millions of dollars in state funding. That money has helped raise an island park to protect against sea-level rise and has funded the construction of a $30 million storm drain system on a major road that’s seen routine flooding. (However, DeSantis vetoed an additional tranche of money for that project last summer.)

Jim Mooney, a Republican state legislator representing the Florida Keys, said the program represents an example of smart state spending. Local governments must match each dollar of state grants, and Mooney said he believes the arrangement is a wise use of local property tax dollars.

“The idea is you need to have shovel-ready projects, because getting these grants is hard,” said Mooney, one of the leading supporters of Resilient Florida. “That’s what you’re collecting people’s property taxes for, to some extent — to get that stuff done.” In Mooney’s island district, Resilient Florida has funded subterranean drainage pipes that reduce residential flooding from high tides.

Resilient Florida was originally set to expire in 2025, but the state legislature renewed it last year without any controversy; the bill that reauthorized the program passed both legislative chambers in less than a month and without any “nay” votes. Even as DeSantis is proposing to shrink the state budget by about 10 percent, his administration has firmed up the revenue source for Resilient Florida. The program will now draw its funding from the Seminole gaming compact, an agreement between the state and the Seminole tribe that governs revenue from online sports betting. It will be funded next year at $150 million. This time, it does not have an expiration date.

“I think it would’ve continued to be funded [without the gaming revenue], it would’ve just been more of a rollercoaster ride,” said Mooney. “There was really no thought that it wasn’t going to move forward.”

Such programs are facing challenges in other parts of the country. The Trump administration has sought to terminate a key federal resilience grant program, and the Department of Homeland Security has paused almost all FEMA hazard mitigation spending. In Louisiana, which has long led the nation on state-level adaptation to climate change, a new governor, Jeff Landry, has halted efforts to fight sea-level rise and prevent coastal erosion. Landry last year canceled a massive sediment diversion project that would have built new coastal land, and the Republican has also meddled with governance for the landmark levee system that protects New Orleans.

Mathew Sanders, a policy expert at the Pew Charitable Trusts who helps states plan for disaster resilience, says the Resilient Florida’s durability comes down to economics. The Sunshine State’s coastline is an integral part of the state’s economy, and future growth depends on functional roads and sewage plants in beachfront towns. Even if the state wanted to cut Resilient Florida spending, it probably couldn’t afford to.

“There’s a direct connection in Florida between the ecological health of the coastline and their ability to generate revenue,” said Sanders. “It’s so reliant on ecotourism, the pure beautiful beaches and the Everglades. The calculus is just different.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A massive climate resilience program is escaping Florida’s DOGE purge on Feb 17, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

PELALAWAN, Indonesia — A radical new policy to relocate people living in a notoriously deforested national park on Sumatra has moved hundreds of families to date, with Indonesian officials presenting the controversial program as a blueprint for other protected areas across Asia’s largest remaining tropical forests. “This activity will serve as a model for other locations in restoring national parks,” Indonesian Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni said in a statement. Tesso Nilo is one of the few remaining habitats of the critically endangered Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatrensis) and Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae). The forest is also home to thousands of plant species. The lowland national park in Sumatra’s Riau province has suffered extensive deforestation, however, despite being granted the highest level of state protection two decades ago. Tesso Nilo was designated a national park in 2004 on a former logging timber concession. Following a subsequent expansion in 2009, Tesso Nilo National Park now spans 81,793 hectares (202,115 acres) — an area larger than New York City. Data from Global Forest Watch, a satellite platform managed by the World Resources Institute, showed Tesso Nilo National Park lost 78% of its old-growth forest between the expansion in 2009 and end-2023. Fieldworkers in Riau say the extraordinary level of destruction in Tesso Nilo reflects complex challenges to the rule of law on the ground, from community encroachment and migration to corruption and organized criminality, which successive local and national governments have failed to control. In an attempt to halt the crisis,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Michigan might be at the forefront of a new clean fuel source — and it’s buried right under the state.

Last month, Governor Gretchen Whitmer said her administration wants to make the state a hub for geologic hydrogen, a potentially untapped reserve of clean fuel below the Earth’s surface that could power the transition away from fossil fuels.

The U.S. already produces millions of tons of hydrogen a year to power carbon-intense transportation sectors like heavy trucking and shipping, but it’s expensive and requires a lot of energy. Harnessing natural hydrogen could bring prices down and cut more emissions from those industries.

Here’s what to know about this potential new source of clean energy:

How does hydrogen form within the Earth?

There are several ways that large amounts of hydrogen may have formed within the Earth’s crust, according to Matt Schrenk, a geomicrobiology professor at Michigan State University. Scientists know that deposits of natural hydrogen are created when water reacts with iron-rich rocks. Another way hydrogen forms is when certain rocks decay over the course of millions to billions of years, but research hasn’t shown it can result in large stores. One theory suggests that hydrogen has been continuously seeping from the Earth’s core since the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Because all of this occurs deep inside the Earth, naturally occurring hydrogen isn’t easy to get to without drilling.

How hydrogen naturally forms under the Earth’s surface. C. Bickel / Science (graphic); Geoffrey Ellis / USGS (data)

Why is Michigan a good place to look for it?

A 2025 study from the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, mapped out areas around the country with a lot of potential for buried hydrogen, with Michigan identified as a bright spot. That’s because the state sits on top of what’s called the Midcontinent Rift. It’s where the North American continent started splitting apart more than 1 billion years ago, then stopped.

“This represents, potentially, a pathway for which deep hydrogen can come up closer to the surface and be collected and extracted,” Schrenk said.

As for possible hot spots beneath the state, think of Michigan’s lower peninsula like a giant bowl — it’s called the Michigan Basin for this reason. The younger, newer rocks are typically in the center of this bowl in the middle of the state. Deeper, older material — places where hydrogen might have formed — is found closer to the bowl’s edges, where Detroit and Traverse City are situated today.

Still, the authors of the USGS study noted that much of the hydrogen they outlined is likely “too deep, too far offshore or in accumulations too small to be economically recoverable.”

Besides Michigan, the USGS study pointed to areas like southern Oklahoma and northeastern Kansas that similarly might be sitting on large reserves of geologic hydrogen.

What is the climate connection?

When burned, hydrogen releases water and heat — and zero carbon emissions — which makes it a clean source of energy that could reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. But because it’s generally hard to access natural hydrogen that comes from the Earth, industries have to produce it — hydrogen powers fuel cells for vehicles and is also a key ingredient in fertilizer. More of it could decarbonize sectors where electrification is difficult, like the shipping industry. But using industrial processes to produce hydrogen takes a lot of energy, usually requiring fossil fuels.

Read Next

A hidden fuel source beneath the Midwest? Scientists are investigating.

Rebecca Egan McCarthy

That’s why clean energy experts are excited about potential underground sources. Even though accessing the Earth’s hydrogen would require drilling, it would still use significantly less energy than producing hydrogen from scratch, according to Todd Allen, co-director of MI Hydrogen, a research institute at the University of Michigan.

“You may have some local energy used to run the drill, but the amount of zero-carbon energy you could get if there’s a lot of geologic hydrogen I think is a bigger advantage,” Allen said.

How likely are we to actually use geologic hydrogen as a power source?

More research is needed to figure out exactly where to drill for it and whether it’s feasible to actually extract it.

“OK, you find it, is there enough of it to be useful? Is it concentrated enough to be useful? Do you have to drill a hole 20 kilometers in the Earth to extract it?” Schrenk at MSU said. “We need the data about where it is to identify whether there are practical solutions to extract it.”

And if large amounts of hydrogen are found, building up infrastructure like pipelines or processing plants would be expensive and time-consuming.

So what does the governor’s executive directive do?

Current regulations around drilling “were all written assuming you’re drilling for something else, say, natural gas,” Allen said.

Governor Whitmer’s executive order will require state agencies to look at those existing laws and ask if anything needs to change for hydrogen drilling, Allen said. Reports from state agencies like the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy and the Public Service Commission will be filed by April.

It’s still “too soon to tell” how big of an industry geologic hydrogen could be, Allen said. “You’re sort of right there at the beginning of the story. And there’s some opportunities for people to sort of nudge that story in a good direction.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s geologic hydrogen? What to know about the clean energy source buried under Michigan. on Feb 17, 2026.

From Grist via This RSS Feed.

Industrial yeasts are a powerhouse of protein production, used to manufacture vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, and other useful compounds. In a new study, MIT chemical engineers have harnessed artificial intelligence to optimize the development of new protein manufacturing processes, which could reduce the overall costs of developing and manufacturing these drugs.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Devastating floods that swept across Southern Africa since December 2025, killing at least 280 people and affecting almost a million, were likely intensified by the impacts of climate change, scientists say. The region’s rainy season hit hard in Mozambique, Eswatini, Madagascar, South Africa and Zimbabwe, displacing 150,000 people and destroying 105,000 hectares (nearly 260,000 acres) of farmland. Most recently, Cyclone Gezani hit Madagascar on Feb. 10, leaving dozens dead. The storm also caused deaths and damages in flood-battered Mozambique. A rapid study by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international consortium of scientists and institutions that investigates the role of human-caused climate change in extreme weather events, found that a warming climate, combined with La Niña weather patterns, aggravated the extreme rains. “The most striking finding was that the rainfall accumulated over just 10 days exceeded the region’s average annual rainfall. This was unprecedented,” one of the study’s lead authors, Izidine Pinto, climatologist and researcher for weather and climate models at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, told Mongabay. He added that some weather stations recorded more than 200 millimeters (8 inches) of rain in just 24 hours. The authors noted that structural vulnerabilities in the affected areas made the climatic shocks even deadlier and more destructive. Mozambique, in particular, Pinto said, was not prepared for such heavy rainfall. The WWA scientists analyzed 10-day maximum rainfall accumulations during the rainy season in Mozambique, South Africa, Eswatini (formerly known as Swaziland) and Zimbabwe from December to the beginning of February. By combining this…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Bacteria have evolved to adapt to all of Earth's most extreme conditions, from scorching heat to temperatures well below zero. Ice caves are just one of the environments hosting a variety of microorganisms that represent a source of genetic diversity that has not yet been studied extensively. Now, researchers in Romania tested antibiotic resistance profiles of a bacterial strain that until recently was hidden in a 5,000-year-old layer of ice of an underground ice cave—and found it could be an opportunity for developing new strategies to prevent the rise of antibiotic resistance and study how resistance naturally evolves and spreads. They reported their discovery in Frontiers in Microbiology.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

On Feb. 13, the leaders of seven states announced, one day before a Trump administration deadline, that there is still no deal to share the diminishing waters of the Colorado River. That leaves the Southwest in a quagmire with uncertain repercussions while the river's depleted reservoirs continue to decline.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

An estimated 7,700 gallons of jet fuel spilled into the James River on Feb. 13 near Newport News Shipbuilding, according to officials. The spill happened during a refueling operation involving the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, which is nearing completion at the shipyard, according to a release from the city of Newport News.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

You may not have noticed, but that endless snowpack has developed a slow leak—in this case, historically slow. Its endurance continues to climb the charts among the snowpacks of yesteryear—and in at least one way may well be unprecedented in the period of record dating to the late 19th century.

From Earth News - Earth Science News, Earth Science, Climate Change via This RSS Feed.

New research has revealed the biggest threats driving species toward extinction in northern San José, Costa Rica. Led by Newcastle University, the study found that the greatest potential to reduce species extinction risk in the Northern Sub-catchments of San José, Costa Rica, lies in addressing habitat loss and degradation due to livestock farming and ranching, urban expansion, and the spread of non-native invasive species.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.

Brazilian researchers have developed a methodology that uses remote sensing to map the impact of frost on corn crops. This reduces exposure to climate risks and uncertainty regarding agricultural losses.

From Biology News - Evolution, Cell theory, Gene theory, Microbiology, Biotechnology via This RSS Feed.