ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

The shoots of plants get all of the glory, with their fruit and flowers and visible structure. But it's the portion that lies below the soil — the branching, reaching arms of roots and hairs pulling up water and nutrients — that interests some plant physiologist and computer scientist the most.

Caecilians have arrived in Miami. Florida Fish and Wildlife officers captured one of the obscure legless amphibians in the Tamiami Canal, the first example of an introduced caecilian in the U.S.

What is the best option for individual water consumption if we take into account both health and environmental impacts? The answer to that question, according to a new study is that, at least in the city of Barcelona, tap water is the option that offers more overall benefits.

Hydrogen fuel derived from the sea could be an abundant and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, but the potential power source has been limited by technical challenges, including how to practically harvest it. Researchers have designed a nanoscale material that can efficiently split seawater into oxygen and a clean energy fuel -- hydrogen.

New research finds that sexual reproduction and multicellularity drive diversity among different species.

A new study tackles one of the oldest questions in the history of the planet: How did living organisms get so big?

The food-water-energy nexus dictates that there is a direct link between these three necessities, and stressing one directly impacts the supply of the other two. As the population grows, human demand for energy and food has caused our freshwater reserves to slowly deplete. Power plants are one of the main culprits contributing to this issue, as they use trillions of gallons of fresh water annually to prevent overheating.

The advent of agriculture was a significant turning point in the history of modern humans, beyond which humans started living a sedentary life and formed a so-called 'civilization.' However, the environmental factors responsible for this revolutionary change in human lifestyle have been unclear for quite long. A new study on finely layered mud at the bottom of a lake in Japan reveals that the answer to this puzzle lies in the stability of the climate.

Converting vacant urban lots into greenspaces can reduce blight and improve neighborhoods, and new research shows that certain types of such post-industrial reclamation efforts offer the added bonus of benefiting bees.

Conservation science and policy could be saving more biodiversity by shifting to measurements and decisions based on preventing the loss of ecosystems and species within protected areas.