Science - Climate latest news

The title here should strike a familiar theme for most readers. Climate forcings do not just include CO2 (other greenhouse gases, aerosols, land use, the sun, the orbit and volcanoes all contribute), and the impact of human emissions often has non-climatic effects on biology and ecosystems. First up last week was a call [...]

The accepted timeframe for the beginnings of life on Earth is now being questioned, after scientists found a key indicator to the earliest life forms in diamonds from Jack Hills in Western Australia. The 4.2 billion-year-old diamonds found trapped inside the Jack Hills zircon crystals are the oldest-known samples of Earth's carbon. The team's discovery of very high concentrations of carbon 12, or "light carbon" within these crystals is remarkable as it is a feature usually associated with organic life.

With the current drive towards production of alternative fuels from plant material, enzymes which can break down this material into useable compounds are required in industrial quantities and at a low cost. One group of scientists have come up with a solution: using plants to make the enzymes.

Meltwater is rapidly increasing the tempo of glacial movements on the rim of the Greenland ice sheet. Over the long term, however, this process is interrupted as meltwater drains away via broad channels, as a result of which ice movement decreases once again. Ultimately, this is not a cause of accelerated sea level rise.

Three plant biologists at Rutgers' Waksman Institute of Microbiology are obsessed with duckweed, a tiny aquatic plant with an unassuming name. Now they have convinced the federal government to focus its attention on duckweed's tremendous potential for cleaning up pollution, combating global warming and feeding the world. The Department of energy's national laboratories will sequence the duckweed genome.

While many plant species move to a new location or go extinct as a result of climate change, grasslands clinging to a steep, rocky dale-side in Northern England seem to defy the odds and adapt to long-term changes in temperature and rainfall, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the national academy of Sciences. The 13-year experiment involved subjecting 30 small grassland plots to microclimate manipulation.

An ancient organism from the pit of a collapsed volcano may hold the key to tomorrow's hydrogen economy. scientists from across the world have formed a team to unlock the process refined by a billions-year old archaea. This novel hyperthermophilic archaea grows best at 80 to 82 degrees Celsius (176-180 Farenheit), close to the boiling point of water.

New coral reef system discovered in Brazil doubles the size of Southern Atlantic Ocean's largest and most diverse reef system.

A newly created spray-on formula increases plants' tolerance of cold temperatures by several degrees. The spray, which is not yet commercially available, can improve plants' cold tolerance between 2.2 and 9.4 degrees Fahrenheit, depending upon the species, according to a professor of botany who co-developed the spray.

Researchers here now have a picture of a key molecule that lets microbes produce carbon dioxide and methane -- the two greenhouse gases associated with global warming. The findings relate to organisms called methanogens and are explained in the journal Proceedings of the national academy of Sciences.