Coastal waters play an important role in the carbon cycle by transferring carbon to the open ocean or burying it in wetland soils and ocean sediments, a new study shows.

For two decades, environmentalist Jürgen Resch has locked horns with Germany’s mighty automobile industry, the backbone of Europe’s most powerful economy. And Resch has shown that he will do what Berlin’s top politicians won’t: hold carmakers — and German municipalities — to the letter of the law when it comes to the high levels of pollution spewed from diesel automobiles. His indispensable ally in this against-the-odds mission has been Germany’s court system.

Lithium-based batteries use more than 50 percent of all cobalt produced in the world. These batteries are in your cell phone, laptop and maybe even your car.

NASA satellite imagery showed that Tropical Cyclone Keni was being battered by vertical wind shear. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite revealed that wind shear was pushing the clouds and storms associated with Keni to the southeast of the center.

The Atlantic overturning – one of Earth’s most important heat transport systems, pumping warm water northwards and cold water southwards – is weaker today than any time before in more than 1000 years. Sea surface temperature data analysis provides new evidence that this major ocean circulation has slowed down by roughly 15 percent since the middle of the 20th century, according to a study published in the highly renowned journal Nature by an international team of scientists. Human-made climate change is a prime suspect for these worrying observations.

A joint research project of the Chronology Laboratory of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) suggests that the years 536 and 541–544 CE were very difficult for many people.

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.

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.

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.

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