News by Subject Earth Science

Research carried out at the University of Kent demonstrates that a technique used to produce stone tools that were first found half a million years ago is likely to have needed a modern human-like hand. This links a stone tool production technique known as 'platform preparation' to the biology of human hands, demonstrating that without the ability to perform highly forceful precision grips, our ancestors would not have been able to produce advanced stone tools like spear points.

There are currently great hopes for solid-state batteries. They contain no liquid parts that could leak or catch fire. For this reason, they do not require cooling and are considered to be much safer, more reliable, and longer lasting than traditional lithium-ion batteries. Juelich scientists have now introduced a new concept that allows currents up to ten times greater during charging and discharging than previously described in the literature.

Climate change and other external forces are causing rapid marine community shifts in Japan's coastal ecosystems. Better understanding of species distribution dynamics, as driven by these factors, can improve conservation efforts and climate change management.

A long-term study led by the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley tracked how hundreds of species in the Carrizo Plain National Monument fared during the historic drought that struck California from 2012 to 2015.

Deforestation is suspected to have contributed to the mysterious collapse of Mayan civilization more than 1,000 years ago. A new study shows that the forest-clearing also decimated carbon reservoirs in the tropical soils of the Yucatan peninsula region long after ancient cities were abandoned and the forests grew back.

Researchers at the George Washington University have published a study in Nature Climate Change that for the first time analyzes all US climate change lawsuits over a 26-year period.

A new study led by scientists from the University of Bristol has used a combination of genomic and fossil data to explain the history of life on Earth, from its origin to the present day.

A team of scientists from the Institute of Mechanics, MSU demonstrated how random fluctuations in the rotation speed and noises influence the number of vortexes in the Couette spherical flow. It turned out that the level of noise and the flow regime have a complicated nonlinear correlation between them. The new data will help to develop more exact models of natural flows including the atmospheric circulation. The results of the work were published in the Chaos journal.