EARTH NEWS: WHAT'S HAPPENING IN SCIENCE AND NATURE:
April 2023: Ultrasound reveals trees’ drought-survival secrets
Scientists brought the lab to the forest in an effort to understand how some species cope with repeated dry spells, which are forming more often and faster (known as “Flash droughts”) due to climate change
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ScienceNews.org Alexander Gulde/Eyeem/Getty Images Plus
A forest in Munich whose trees are much like those being closely monitored by scientists on dry spell recovery
April 2023: A massive cavern beneath a West Antarctic glacier is teeming with life
After glaciologists bored 500 meters through the Kamb Ice Stream, they discovered an abundance of marine animals known as amphipods
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ScienceNews.org (photo courtesy of Huw Horgan)
Researchers drilled through 500 meters of ice and spent two weeks lowering their instruments through to the cavern
News from Outer Space!
May 2022: These are the first plants grown in moon dirt:
The small garden shows the promise and potential challenges of farming on the moon
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This thale cress seedling sprouted from a seed potted in lunar dirt collected during some of the Apollo missions.
ScienceNews.org TYLER JONES, IFAS/UF
April 2022: All of the bases in DNA and RNA have now been found in meteorites
The discovery adds to evidence that suggests life’s precursors came from space.
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ScienceNews.org
A 2-gram chunk from this rock — a piece of the meteorite that fell near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 — contains two crucial components of DNA and RNA now identified for the first time in an extraterrestrial source, researchers say.
NASA
World's Most Endangered Marine Mammals Down to 30 Individuals
Vaquitas (photo courtesy of NOAA)
Click on this link to read about the vaquita, a small (five-foot) species of porpoise that is evolutionarily unique and has no close relatives. (Porpoises as a group descend from hooved animals that entered the water about 50 million years ago; porpoises diverged from other cetaceans about 15 million years ago.) This remarkable mammal has been rendered nearly extinct by human activity, especially fishing: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/world-s-most-endangered-marine-mammal-down-30-individuals
Meet the World's Rarest Primate
Click on this link to meet the Hainan gibbon, a primate once abundant in China but now down to fewer than 30 individuals: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33776466
Successor to the Hubble Telescope is Coming
The Hubble telescope (photo courtesy of NASA)
Click on his link to learn about the successor to world-changing Hubble telescope, the James Webb telescope, which will be launched into space in 2018:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33657528
Officials Seize 3.1 Tons of Pangolin Scales
Photo of tree pangolin by Valerius Tygart
Click on his link to learn about the latest efforts to combat trade in the world's most trafficked wild mammal, the pangolin, which is in high demand in parts of Asia, including China and Vietnam, for its scales (used in Asian medicine in the superstitious belief that the scales—which are made of the same material as human fingernails—have medicinal value) and its meat. Of the eight species of pangolin in Africa and Asia (some spend much of their time in trees, others are ground-dwellers), two are listed as critically endangered, two as endangered and four as vulnerable. In other words, they're all in trouble: http://www.awf.org/news/officials-seize-31-tons-pangolin-scales