Protected natural areas across Europe are changing. Climate change, with rising temperatures and heavy rainfall, is turbocharging the growth of shrubs and trees, choking the flowers and insects that need the light and heat of open spaces. Traditionally, this scenario prompts nature managers to reach for chainsaws and brush cutters to keep the landscape open. But researchers at Aarhus University and the Natural History Museum, Aarhus, Denmark, can now show that horses and cattle represent a more effective method of nature management given adequate time to do their work.

For the past two decades, scientists have wondered about a bright, distinct striped pattern seen in radio waves emanating from the Crab Pulsar, the remnant of a supernova observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in the year 1054.

The Florida Everglades is a complicated climate actor. The 1.5-million-acre wetland system remains a carbon sink, removing an average of 13.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, but the system also releases methane. In a new study, Yale School of the Environment scientists have analyzed the greenhouse gas fluxes in its mangroves and fresh-water marshes, providing a more detailed approach for guiding restoration efforts.

A research team led by a Keele scientist has shed new light on how a mysterious rock formation in Oman was created, which could reveal new details about Earth's ability to store carbon dioxide (CO2). The study, led by Dr. Elliot Carter in Keele's School of Life Sciences, in collaboration with the Universities of Ottawa and Manchester, looked at geological evidence from Oman to better understand processes that occur in subduction zones, which is where one of Earth's tectonic plates sinks beneath another due to the plates colliding together. This process is active around much of the Pacific "Ring of Fire" today, for example.

Porpoises are entirely dependent on their hearing for survival. They navigate, hunt, and communicate by emitting rapid click sounds and listening to the returning echoes. However, with increasingly noisy oceans, it is getting harder for porpoises to "hear their way." Noise from shipping is a particular problem. While ship engines primarily emit low-frequency noise, they also produce high-frequency sounds that can drown out the porpoises' own clicks. These clicks are sharp, brief, and only travel limited distances, making them highly vulnerable to noise sources in their immediate vicinity.

In 2022, a Russian whale researcher made a remarkable discovery on Bering Island off Russia's Pacific coast: a severed killer whale fin marked with the teeth of another killer whale. In 2024, it happened again. The two finds were two kilometers apart.

No "sticky ends"? No problem. A new study by NYU chemists finds that DNA tiles can assemble into 3D structures without the sticky cohesion of hydrogen bonding. This finding, published in Nature Communications, turns a fundamental paradigm in the field of DNA self-assembly on its head.

How do you keep a copper catalyst from losing its oomph? Just add a dusting of platinum, says a new study published in Nature Materials. A team of researchers, including scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, investigated a class of metal nanoparticles used as catalysts in major industrial processes. They found that adding a trace amount of platinum to copper nanoparticles greatly reduced an effect known as "sintering," which causes these catalysts to degrade over time.

Using future climate scenarios based on wildfire damages in North America, scientists estimate that up to 10,000 or more lives may be saved annually in the United States if society is able to mitigate climate change by keeping the global mean surface temperature (GMST) at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial age (1850-1900) levels. Currently, the GMST is at 1.3 to 1.4 degrees C but is projected to reach 3 degrees C with the current direction of climate change. The findings are detailed in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

During their search for food, most insects head specifically for the flowers that promise the highest reward. But how do they know which ones to choose? Researchers from the University of Konstanz and the University of Würzburg have now studied how bumblebees process information about their food sources.