College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

LIVE SCIENCE - Imagine a planet twice as wide as Earth, covered in an ocean that smells like sweet cabbage. Every day, a faint red star warms this ocean world and the uncountable masses of hungry, plankton-like creatures that inhabit it. They rise to the surface by the billions, joining together in a living, floating...

US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT - It’s a simple and common prescription for global warming and fire suppression: Plant more trees. But where they’re planted makes a real difference, new research shows. "Our study found more cooling from planting in warm, wet regions, where trees grow year-round," study first author James Gomez , a graduate...

EARTH.COM - Planting more trees cools the planet and can help reduce fires, but the biggest climate returns per tree come from the tropics. That is the core message of new research, which shows that where we plant matters almost as much as how much we plant. The study, led by the University of California...

YALE - The murky world at the bottom of the oceans is now a little clearer, thanks to a new study that tracks the evolution of marine sediment layers across hundreds of millions of years. It is a story of world-building on a grand, yet granular, scale, accomplished by a succession of marine animals that...

IFLSCIENCE - Something’s stirring in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – and a strange “hole” of cold water in the North Atlantic may provide new clues about what’s up. But is the system on the brink of full-blown collapse, or will it keep churning on despite mounting pressure? The AMOC is “the conveyor belt...

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - Just south of Greenland, in the northern Atlantic Ocean, a strange area of water has been confounding scientists for years. While the rest of the ocean warms, that patch has been mysteriously cooling. Researchers have offered different theories behind this “cold blob,” such as changes in ocean circulation patterns or aerosol pollution...

GIZMODO - After relying on an educated guess for decades, scientists have finally confirmed the dipole moment of aluminum monochloride (AlCl), an elusive but important molecule known to sneak around the interiors of ancient galaxies. An electric dipole moment is a measure of polarity—a crucial determinant for many physical properties of any system, such as...

SCIENCE ALERT - Over the last decade, Earth's oceans have been warming at unprecedented rates, yet one mysterious blob of water, just south of Greenland, has defied this trend. It has stubbornly remained colder than its surrounding waters for over a century now. "People have been asking why this cold spot exists," says University of...

LIVE SCIENCE - Researchers have finally answered a longstanding question about a giant patch of cold water in the Atlantic Ocean, blaming a change in ocean currents for the unexpected cooling. The anomaly, located just south of Greenland, is — perhaps counterintuitively — called the North Atlantic Warming Hole, and it has been stumping scientists...