ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

A major challenge for fully autonomous vehicles is navigating bad weather. Snow especially confounds crucial sensor data that helps a vehicle gauge depth, find obstacles and keep on the correct side of the yellow line, assuming it is visible. Averaging more than 200 inches of snow every winter, Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula is the perfect place to push autonomous vehicle tech to its limits.

The oral secretions of herbivorous insects can activate plant defense mechanisms that protect plant cells from being digested. However, scientists have discovered that some larvae 'partner up' with bacteria that help interrupt these plant defense mechanisms. This disrupts the plant's defenses before the digestive proteins that the larvae smear on them. These findings may help agricultural scientists devise countermeasures that protect important agricultural species from the larvae.

According to a new study, what's key to coral reefs surviving climate-driven heatwaves and subsequent bleaching is managing global climate change -- and local conditions.

Lead paint and leaded gasoline have been banned for decades, but unsafe levels of lead remain in some urban soils, a new study finds. The researchers mapped soil lead concentrations along 25 miles of streets in Durham, N.C. Though contamination generally has declined since the 1970s, soil collected near houses predating 1978 still averaged 649 milligrams of lead per kilogram of soil, well above the 400 mg/kg threshold associated with health risks to children.

To survive in a reduced pH environment, marine organisms have to adjust their physiology which, at the molecular level, is achieved by modifying the expression of genes. The study of such changes in gene expression can aid in revealing the adaptive mechanisms of life under predicted future ocean acidification conditions.

With global warming decreasing the size of New Zealand's alpine zone, a new study found out what this means for our altitude-loving kea.

shows that a relaxation in the thick aggregate of icebergs floating at the glacier-ocean boundary of the Jakobshavn Isbræ occurs up to an hour before calving events. This finding may help scientists better understand future sea-level rise scenarios and could also help them predict when major episodes of calving are about to occur.

A small Japanese fishing community devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011 managed to recover from the disaster through cooperative community activity despite the propensity for individualist-competitive behavior within fisheries - cooperative activity that continued many years later.

With the expansion of oxygen-depleted waters in the oceans due to climate change, some species of foraminifera (forams, a type of protist or single-celled eukaryote) that thrive in those conditions could be big winners, biologically speaking.

A new fungus strain bred in a lab could provide a chemical-free method for eradicating mites that kill honey bees. Varroa destructor mites play a large role in Colony Collapse Disorder, which destroys thousands of bee colonies every year.

If a ban were introduced on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, and they were replaced by electric cars, the result would be a great reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. That is the finding of new research, looking at emissions from the entire life cycle - from manufacture of electric cars and batteries, to electricity used for operation.

For decades, wealthy nations have transported plastic trash, and its environmental problems, to poorer countries, but researchers have found a potential bright side to this seemingly unequal trade: plastic waste may provide an economic boon for the lower-income countries. Researchers analyzed 11 years of data on the global plastics trade against economic measures for 85 countries. They found plastic waste import was associated with growth in GDP per capita in lower-income countries.