ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

Black bears (Ursus americanus) reproduced at a younger age in urban areas and were nearly twice the size of bears in national forests shortly after their first birthdays.

The most devastating tornadoes are often preceded by a cloudy plume of ice and water vapor billowing above a severe thunderstorm. New research reveals the mechanism for these plumes could be tied to 'hydraulic jumps' -- a phenomenon Leonardo Da Vinci observed more than 500 years ago.

A 170 m record of marine sediment cores extracted from Adélie Land in Antarctica is yielding new insights into the complicated relationship between sea ice and climate change.

Wingtips of certain species of silkmoth are structured to reflect sound and throw off attackers, according to a new study.

Many scientists consider the 'Cambrian explosion' -- which occurred about 530-540 million years ago -- as the first major appearance of many of the world's animal groups in the fossil record. Like adding pieces to a giant jigsaw puzzle, each discovery dating from this time period has added another piece to the evolutionary map of modern animals. Now, researchers have found a rare, 500-million-year-old 'worm-like' fossil called a palaeoscolecid, which is an uncommon fossil group in North America. The researchers believe this find, from an area in western Utah, can help scientists better understand how diverse the Earth's animals were during the Cambrian explosion.

Viral fossils buried in DNA may protect against future virus infections, a new marsupial study suggests.

The use of large herbivores can be an effective means to prevent and mitigate wildfires, especially in places facing land abandonment. They can replace much more costly solutions like firefighting or mechanical vegetation removal.

Sunlight was once thought to only fragment plastics in the marine environment into smaller particles that chemically resemble the original material and persist forever. However, scientists more recently have learned that sunlight also chemically transforms plastic into a suite of polymer-, dissolved-, and gas-phased products.

The new study reveals just how dramatically climate change has impacted aquatic ecosystems in the Sierra Nevada. Scientists can use the data to anticipate changes coming in the near future, and how those changes might influence water availability.

Before humans made their way to New Zealand, the critically endangered flightless parrot known as the k?k?p? likely numbered in the hundreds of thousands. By 1995, their numbers had dwindled to just 51 birds, including 50 isolated on tiny Stewart Island and a single male, known as Richard Henry, all alone on the mainland. Today, those numbers have grown to about 200 individuals. Now, the first genome sequencing of the species offer some surprisingly good news: despite 10,000 years of island isolation and inbreeding, the k?k?p? appear to have lost potentially deleterious mutations rather than accumulating them. In fact, they now carry fewer deleterious mutations than now-extinct populations on the mainland once did.

Spectacular ice age landscapes beneath the North Sea have been discovered using 3D seismic reflection technology. Similar to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) the images reveal in unprecedented detail huge seafloor channels - each one 10 times wider than the River Thames.

A new dinosaur from the lower Upper Cretaceous of Uzbekistan, Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, was described from a single maxilla fossil. The research team estimated that this carcharodontosaurian weighed over 1000 kg and measured 7.5--8.0 meters in length, much larger than previously described predators from the same formation. The fossil's age, location, and co-occurrence with the smaller tyrannosaurid Timurlengia shed light on the transition from carcharodontosaurians to tyrannosaurids occupying the apex predator niche.

Nanoengineers have developed COVID-19 vaccine candidates that can take the heat. Their key ingredients? Viruses from plants or bacteria.

When rats are fed a high fat diet, this disturbs the body clock in their brain that normally controls satiety, leading to over-eating and obesity, according to new research.

Ever wondered why birds are born to peep, chirrup and sing? Surprisingly international avian experts have shown this to be true, literally, after finding fluctuations in bird species' heartbeat responses to their parents' calls -- from inside the egg. Using non-invasive techniques, a study found evidence of prenatal auditory learning in embryos of three vocal learning species (Superb fairy-wren, red-winged fairy-wren and Darwin's small ground finch) and two vocal non-learning species (little penguin and Japanese quail).