ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

Researchers are developing a new filter membrane that is highly efficient at filtering and inactivating a wide variety of air-borne and water-borne viruses.

Glaciologists analyzed Antarctic ice cores to understand the continent's air temperatures during the most recent glacial period. The results help understand how the region behaves during a major climate transition.

Mockingbirds follow similar musical rules as those found in human music, from Beethoven to Kendrick Lamar.

Whales are largely protected from direct catch, but many populations' numbers still remain far below what they once were. A study suggests that, in addition to smaller population sizes, those whales that survive are struggling. As evidence, they find that right whales living in the North Atlantic today are significantly shorter than those born 30 to 40 years ago.

The biggest shark attack in history did not involve humans. A new study by earth scientists has turned up a massive die-off of sharks roughly 19 million years ago. It came at a period in history when there were more than 10 times more sharks patrolling the world's oceans than there are today.

An international team of researchers has now succeeded in reconstructing changes in rainfall in Central Asia over the past five million years. The information preserved within the sedimentary succession provides the missing link for understanding land-water feedbacks for global climate.

Seismic waves generated by earthquakes travel through Earth's solid iron inner core faster in the direction of the rotation axis than along the equator. Scientists created a core growth model to explain this. To fit seismic data, the model predicts that asymmetric growth of the core leads to crystal movement that preferentially aligns iron-nickel crystals north-south. The model implies that the core is only 0.5-1.5 billion years old, a fraction of Earth's age.

Disruptions from sea-level rise and coastal flooding events have significant indirect impacts on urban traffic networks and road safety.

A recent study has discovered a novel way to manufacture single gyroid photonic crystals to work in the visible light spectrum, based on the self-assembly mechanism found in blue-winged leafbirds.

A new study reveals that beetles, wasps and other beneficial arthropods are nearly twice as abundant and diverse in uncultivated field edges in the spring as they are in areas that are cropped - if those field edges are rich in an array of flowers and other broad-leaved plants and not just mowed grass.

All fish are not created equal, at least when it comes to nutritional benefits. This truth has important implications for how declining fish biodiversity can affect human nutrition, according to a computer modeling study.

New research shows that most extreme heat events are going to occur in the tropics rather than the poles.