News by Subject Earth Science

Spanish epidemiologists and geologists have found associations between esophageal cancer and soils where lead is abundant, lung cancer and terrains with increased copper content, brain tumor with areas rich in arsenic, and bladder cancer with high cadmium levels. These statistical links do not indicate that there is a cause-effect relationship between soil type and cancer, but they suggest that the influence of metals from the earth's surface on the geographical distribution of tumors should be analyzed.

A weather system moving slowly westward through the northwestern Hawaiian Islands has caused destructive flooding and mudslides and NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM satellite analyzed the heavy rainfall.

Scientists from the Institute of Soil Science and collaborators conducted a comprehensive study that determined changes in SOC over the last three decades and identified the dominant agronomic, economic and policy drivers behind these changes and their implications for future carbon sequestration in Chinese croplands.

We might think of roots as necessary, but uninteresting, parts of the crop production process. New research, however, focuses on what's going on in the soil with the plant's roots and the chemicals they produce.

A moss capable of removing arsenic from contaminated water has been discovered by researchers from Stockholm University. And it happens quickly -- in just one hour, the arsenic level is so low that the water is no longer harmful for people to drink. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Pollution.