ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

A study has shown species that rely on darkness to forage and feed are losing the gift of camouflage thanks to advances in the lighting used to illuminate the world's cities and coastlines.

Researchers have found a way to control the charge of nanoparticles on a two-fluid interface to create a more stable system in which its charge can also be switched and controlled. The ability to change the charge of nanoparticles on a two-fluid interface would result in a surface that could acclimate itself to fit many diverse applications, such as a more durable firefighting operation and even controlled release in certain medications.

A vertical wind tunnel has supplied important data to facilitate the prediction of heavy rain, hail, and graupel precipitation.

A superhuman effort by an army of volunteers during the UK's first COVID-19 lockdown has resulted in 5.2 million rainfall observations, recorded by hand on paper sheets now stored in the Met Office archives, being added to a digital national record. The record now has significantly more data for pre-1960 and has filled in what was a data black hole pre-1862. The work has revealed some record-breaking 19th century weather, which is published in a new paper.

By comparing century-old eggs preserved in museum collections to modern observations, scientists were able to determine that about a third of the bird species nesting in Chicago have are laying their eggs a month earlier than they were a hundred years ago. As far as the researchers can tell, the culprit in this shift is climate change.

A new type of ultraviolet light that is safe for people destroyed more than 98 percent of airborne microbes in a room within five minutes, a study found.

Biologists have developed a new method to measure the extent to which regional geographic features -- including barriers between regions, like mountains or water -- affect local rates of speciation, extinction and dispersal for species. Distances over water have a much greater effect on limiting movement than distances over land, the scientists discovered. They tested their model with neotropical anole lizards and found that distances over water have three times the effect of equivalent distances over land.