Tag Archives: national science foundation

‘Dark Oxidants’ Form Away from Sunlight in Lake and Ocean Depths, Underground Soils

New findings overturn understanding of light-dependent environmental oxidants

Breathing oxygen… can be hazardous to your health?

Indeed, our bodies aren’t perfect. They make mistakes, among them producing toxic chemicals, called oxidants, in cells. We fight these oxidants naturally, and by eating foods rich in antioxidants such as blueberries and dark chocolate.

All forms of life that breathe oxygen—even ones that can’t be seen with the naked eye, such as bacteria—must fight oxidants to live. (more…)

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How some leaves got fat: It’s the veins

Some plants, such as succulents, have managed to grow very plump leaves. For that to happen, according to a new study in Current Biology, plants had to evolve 3-D arrangements of their leaf veins in order to maintain adequately efficient hydraulics for photosynthesis.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A garden variety leaf is a broad, flat structure, but if the garden happens to be somewhere arid, it probably includes succulent plants with plump leaves full of precious water. Fat leaves did not emerge in the plant world easily. A new Brown University study published in Current Biology reports that to sustain efficient photosynthesis, they required a fundamental remodeling of leaf vein structure: the addition of a third dimension. (more…)

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World’s Longest-Running Plant Monitoring Program Now Digitized

Data from the research plots on Tumamoc Hill reveal changes in the Sonoran Desert and have been important to key advances in the science of ecology.

Researchers at the University of Arizona’s Tumamoc Hill have digitized 106 years of growth data on individual plants, making the information available for study by people all over the world.

Knowing how plants respond to changing conditions over many decades provides new insights into how ecosystems behave. (more…)

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Where Does Charcoal, or Black Carbon, in Soils Go?

Scientists find surprising new answers in wetlands such as the Everglades

Scientists have uncovered one of nature’s long-kept secrets–the true fate of charcoal in the world’s soils.

The ability to determine the fate of charcoal is critical to knowledge of the global carbon budget, which in turn can help understand and mitigate climate change.

However, until now, researchers only had scientific guesses about what happens to charcoal once it’s incorporated into soil. They believed it stayed there.

Surprisingly, most of these researchers were wrong. (more…)

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Cutting Specific Atmospheric Pollutants Would Slow Sea Level Rise

Decreasing emissions of black carbon, methane and other pollutants makes a difference

With coastal areas bracing for rising sea levels, new research indicates that cutting emissions of certain pollutants can greatly slow sea level rise this century.

Scientists found that reductions in four pollutants that cycle comparatively quickly through the atmosphere could temporarily forestall the rate of sea level rise by roughly 25 to 50 percent.

The researchers focused on emissions of four heat-trapping pollutants: methane, tropospheric ozone, hydrofluorocarbons and black carbon. (more…)

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Some Alaskan trout use flexible guts for the ultimate binge diet

Imagine having a daylong Thanksgiving feast every day for a month, then, only pauper’s rations the rest of the year.

University of Washington researchers have discovered Dolly Varden, a kind of trout, eating just that way in Alaska’s Chignik Lake watershed.

Organs such as the stomach and intestines in the Dolly Varden doubled to quadrupled in size when eggs from spawning sockeye salmon became available each August, the researchers found. They were like vacuums sucking up the eggs and nipping at the flesh of spawned-out salmon carcasses. (more…)

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