ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

Eighteen months ago, stickers began to dot the floors of most shops, spaced about six feet apart, indicating the physical distance required to avoid the COVID-19 virus an infected person may shed when breathing or speaking. But is the distance enough to help avoid infectious aerosols?

So many climate models, so little time ... A new way of measuring ocean temperatures helps scientists sort the likely from unlikely scenarios of global warming.

In times of exacerbating biodiversity loss, reliable data on species occurrence are essential. Environmental DNA (eDNA) - DNA released from organisms into the water - is increasingly used to detect fishes in biodiversity monitoring campaigns. However, eDNA turns out to be capable of providing much more than fish occurrence data, including information on other vertebrates. A study demonstrates how comprehensively vertebrate diversity can be assessed at no additional costs.

A new, location-specific agricultural greenhouse gas emission study is the first to account for net carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from all subsectors related to food production and consumption. The work could help identify the primary plant- and animal-based food sectors contributing to three major greenhouse gas emissions and allow policymakers to take action to reduce emissions from the top-emitting food commodities at different locations across the globe.

Urbanization trends in the Himalaya are exposing more people to risk from compound hazards such as flooding, landslides and wildfires, a new study has found.

The effects of monsoon rainfall on food insecurity in Nepal vary by earthquake exposure, with regions that experienced both heavy earthquake shaking and abundant rainfall more likely to have an inadequate supply of nutritious food, according to new research.

A decades-long study of introduced voles on the Norwegian islands of Svalbard is helping to answer a longstanding puzzle of Arctic ecology -- what drives the well-established population cycles of small Arctic mammals, such as voles and lemmings. These plant-eating rodents are among the most populous Arctic mammals. The results suggest the importance of predators as a primary factor driving the cycles, and shows that bottom-up, herbivore-plant interactions fail to generate their usual population cycles.

The increasing use of photoinitiators, especially in medical settings, has raised concerns about their adverse effects on human health. Now, scientists have shown that three photoinitiators -- 1-HCHPK, MBB, and MTMP -- show estrogen-like activity in mice and increase the growth of breast cancer tumors in these animals. Their results warn against the use of such chemicals in medical instruments like containers and call for the prompt development of safer alternatives.

Researchers have imaged the atoms at the surface of the light-absorbing layer in a new type of next-generation solar cells, made from a crystal material called metal-halide perovskite. Their findings have solved a long-standing mystery in the field of solar power technology, showing how power-boosting and stability-enhancing chlorine is incorporated into the perovskite material.