ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

Zebra finches innovate solutions to novel foraging tasks, where sometimes success is related to personality type.

While coastal flooding from tropical weather events such as hurricanes tend to get a lot of media attention, a new study from the University of Delaware found that midlatitude weather events like Nor'easters can produce flood levels just as severe and occur much more frequently in the Mid-Atlantic.

Plesiosaurs are characterized by four uniform flippers. It was possible to reconstruct whether they used these in a rowing or flying motion underwater thanks to a combination of paleontological and engineering methods.

High-resolution microscopy now enabled an international research team to enlarge the knowledge about species-specific differences of the architecture of cortical neurons.

Sparse data often make it difficult to track how climate change is affecting populations of insect species. A new study has now evaluated an extensive species mapping database (Artenschutzkartierung, ASK) and assessed the population trends of butterflies, dragonflies and grasshoppers in Bavaria since 1980. The main finding: heat-loving species have been increasing.