Songbirds exposed to widely used insecticides during migration pit stops on farmland could lose significant body weight and become disoriented, research by York University and the University of Saskatchewan (U. of S.) has found.

The researchers exposed white-crowned sparrows on spring migration to realistic doses of two different insecticides – imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid, and chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate – to see the effects on migratory activity, orientation and body mass.

A targeted expansion of climate observing systems could help scientists answer knotty questions about climate while delivering trillions of dollars in benefits, according to a new paper published today in the online journal Earth’s Future. Better observations would provide decision makers information they need to protect public health and the economy in the coming decades, the scientists say.

Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, director of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, said that improving our ability to predict and plan for droughts, floods, extreme heat events, famine, sea level rise and changes in freshwater availability is likely to  yield significant savings  each year.

Sitting in a dwarf galaxy about 500 million light years away, supernova iPTF14hls initially seemed like the ordinary explosion of a red giant star when it was discovered by the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) survey in September 2014. Then the brightness of this event lasted more than four times longer than a normal supernova.

Of the approximately two dozen medical CT scanners scattered throughout Stanford’s main campus and medical centers, two can be found nestled in basement labs of the Green Earth Sciences Buildings.

The School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with the Institut de Biologie Moléculaire des Plantes (CNRS, Strasbourg, France), has identified a new strategy to simultaneously enhance health-promoting vitamin E by ~6-fold and double both provitamin A and lycopene contents in tomatoes, to significantly boost antioxidant properties.

Worms and clams enhance the release of methane up to eight times more compared to sea bottoms without animals, shows a study by scientists at Stockholm University and Cardiff University.

A Sandia National Laboratories-led team has demonstrated faster, more efficient ways to turn discarded plant matter into chemicals worth billions. The team’s findings could help transform the economics of making fuels and other products from domestically grown renewable sources.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over the Philippines and saw the thirtieth tropical cyclone of the northwestern Pacific Ocean typhoon season form.

Mushrooms may contain unusually high amounts of two antioxidants that some scientists suggest could help fight aging and bolster health, according to a team of Penn State researchers.

Simple technologies can be learned effectively through imitation, while complex methods require professional training. If Ghanaian pineapple farmers are to achieve higher yields through more sustainable agriculture, they will need to be trained in exactly these types of complex applications. This was the conclusion reached by a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (ifW), who provide evidence for this assertion in the form of a new study with recommendations.