News by Subject Biology

Eighty-four percent of the wells sampled in the Kings Mountain Belt and the Charlotte and Milton Belts of the Piedmont region of North Carolina contained concentrations of vanadium and hexavalent chromium that exceeded health recommendations from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

With 3,000 known species and thousands more left to describe, the wasps of the subfamily Microgastrinae are the single most important group of parasitoids attacking the larvae of butterflies and moths, many of which are economically important pests. Consequently, these wasps have a significant impact on both the world's economy and biodiversity. All currently available information about the group is now brought together in a monograph published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal ZooKeys.

Years of cloud data over a shipping route between Europe and South Africa shows that pollution from ships has significantly increased the reflectivity of the clouds. More generally, the results suggest that industrial pollution's effect on clouds has masked about a third of the warming due to fossil fuel burning since the late 1800s.

If artificial light shines into the Arctic Ocean during the polar night, does it matter? A new paper in Communications Biology says the answer to this is a strong yes.

Some common strategies to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of concrete production could have unintended consequences for local air pollution and related health damages, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.