articles

Glaciers in the high mountain regions of the Himalayas offer a different picture to our Alpine glaciers: many of them are completely covered in debris, and many areas are overlooked by steep ice walls – vertical cliffs up to 30 metres high. From a distance, this makes the glacier surface look like the warty skin of a toad.

Smoke from wildfires may send people – particularly seniors – to hospital emergency rooms (ERs) with heart, stroke-related complaints, according to new research in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the Open Access Journal of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association.

Due to their worldwide distribution, trees have an extraordinary role in removing excessive amounts of CO2 released by our highly industrialized and mobile modern societies from the atmosphere. So far however, no tool exists which would enable scientists to precisely calculate the carbon dioxide uptake of trees over their whole lifetime. Using a decade-long sequence of annual growth rings from pine trees, scientists at the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, NMR for Life, at Umeå University’s Chemical Biological Centre, (KBC) have introduced a highly advanced technique for tracking the carbon metabolism of plants and its environmental controls. This technique lays the foundation for much improved parameterizations of climate change and global vegetation models, which will tell what the future holds in store.

A vaccine may successfully turn off peanut allergy in mice, a new study shows.

Baby fish will find it harder to reach secure shelters in future acidified oceans – putting fish populations at risk, new research from the University of Adelaide has concluded.