Discovery

A Century’s Evidence On The Benefits Of Planting Trees

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People work to reforest Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania circa 1934.
Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Planting trees, we have noted, is smart policy.  Some campaigns may have stretched beyond scientific evidence, but science has given us plenty to go on:

Very cool: trees stalling effects of global heating in eastern US, study finds

Vast reforestation a major reason for ‘warming hole’ across parts of US where temperatures have flatlined or cooled

Civilian Conservation Corps workers plant 15,000,000 trees across the wastelands of southern Mississippi on 11 April 1940. They are part of the United Forest Service which will re-establish forests destroyed by logging and lumbering operations decades ago. Photograph: AP

Trees provide innumerable benefits to the world, from food to shelter to oxygen, but researchers have now found their dramatic rebound in the eastern US has delivered a further, stunning feat – the curtailing of the soaring temperatures caused by the climate crisis.

While the US, like the rest of the world, has heated up since industrial times due to the burning of fossil fuels, scientists have long been puzzled by a so-called “warming hole” over parts of the US south-east where temperatures have flatlined, or even cooled, despite the unmistakable broader warming trend. Continue reading →

Anchovies Rock

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Kalichka / Getty

Anchovies are not exactly a staple in our pages, but they make their presence known. They are important. Thanks to The Atlantic, and their collaboration with Hakai Magazine for this article by Christina Couch that illustrates another remarkable feature of these small creatures:

Anchovies Are a Force to Be Reckoned With

The little fish’s mating rocks the ocean as much as a major storm.

Bieito Fernández Castro wasn’t expecting to find a turbulent hotbed of anchovy sex.

Commissioned by the Spanish government to investigate the conditions behind algae blooms, which kill mussels, Continue reading →

How Birds See Color

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Forget cerulean — a bright, clear sky is actually dominated by ultraviolet light. Humans can’t see ultraviolet light, but many birds can. “Their sky will be essentially an ultraviolet sky,” said Daniel Hanley, a sensory ecologist at George Mason University.

Birds have gotten more attention in our pages than any other person, place or thing since we first started. Today that attention is focused on their sight:

A Bird’s-Eye View of a Technicolor World

Scientists have devised a new video system that reveals how animals see color, and us.

Is the sky truly blue?

Kew Gardens & New Species

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Cochlospermum adjanyae, a flowering plant that grows mostly underground and was first recorded by scientists in Angola in 2023. STEVE BOYES

Thanks to Yale e360:

Ten Curious New Plants and Fungi Recorded in 2023

Aeranthes bigibbum. JOHAN HERMANS / RBG KEW

As the planet warms and extinctions mount, scientists are racing to catalog the vast array of life on Earth before species disappear. This year, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recorded 89 new species of plant and fungi across the globe, from the rocky edges of Antarctica to a dormant volcano in Indonesia.

Baphia arenicola.

Baphia arenicola. DAVID GOYDER / RBG KEW

“It is an incredibly exciting time to be a scientist, but even as we make these wonderful new discoveries, we must remember that nature is under threat, and we have the power to do something about it,” Martin Cheek, a senior researcher with Kew, said in a statement. Continue reading →

Plastic’s Plentiful Problems

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Emil Lippe for The New York Times

The waste has been our main objection to plastic water bottles. But there are other major questions.

We have reason to wonder (more on that another day) whether water in reusable glass bottles is an answer to this one:

Bottled Water Is Full of Plastic Particles. Can They Harm Your Health?

Here’s what scientists know so far about the health effects of nanoplastics, and what you can do to reduce your exposure.

A liter of bottled water contains nearly a quarter of a million pieces of nanoplastic on average, according to new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Continue reading →

Ancient Amazon Carbon Capture

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A Kuikuro village in the southeastern Amazon. JOSHUA TONEY

Thanks to Yale e360 for this one:

How Ancient Amazonians Locked Away Thousands of Tons of Carbon in “Dark Earth”

A new study reveals how, by cultivating fertile soil for farming, ancient Amazonians locked away thousands of tons of carbon that have stayed in the ground for centuries. Continue reading →

ChatGPT & Whale Chat

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Sperm whales communicate via clicks, which they also use to locate prey in the dark. Illustration by Sophy Hollington

Thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for this:

Can We Talk to Whales?

Researchers believe that artificial intelligence may allow us to speak to other species.

Ah, the world! Oh, the world!

—“Moby-Dick.”

David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.” Continue reading →

The Mind Of A Bee

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Bees’ brains are always of interest, and both the publisher below and the author above makes a good case for why this book matters:

Most of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. Continue reading →

Among The Reasons To Regenerate Soil

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Organikos soil regeneration view from above, early Tuesday morning

When we started the berm where the sugarcane grows now, we knew we had a multi-year project ahead of us. This morning, before the sun had risen enough to shine on the land, I snapped the photo above, looking down on the acreage where we have planted more than 100 trees to provide shade for coffee we will plant in the near future. Besides all that, plenty of good ideas for how and why to regenerate the quality of the soil on that land; here’s some more:

A springtail crawls over snail eggs. ANDY MURRAY

Nearly Two-Thirds of All Species Live in the Ground, Scientists Estimate

Soils are more rich in life than coral reefs or rainforest canopies, providing a home to nearly two-thirds of all species, according to a sprawling new analysis. Continue reading →

Huilo Huilo’s Hojarasca

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We first noticed this film contest three years ago, and have followed it since. The 3rd-place winner of this year’s film contest was made in the Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve, habitat of the endangered species pictured above. In 2009 I was in the middle of a two-year work engagement in southern Chile. During the middle of that year Amie, as well as Seth and Milo, were able to join me for a few months and we spent time in this reserve. I am happy to be reminded:

In a Chilean Forest Reserve, the Remarkable Darwin’s Frog Endures

Four emerging filmmakers from Latin America collaborated to film Darwin’s frog and the biologist who studies the endangered species in Chile’s Huilo Huilo Biological Reserve. “Hojarasca: The Hidden Hope” is the Third-Place Winner of the 2023 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest.

Worldwide, amphibians are going extinct — victims of habitat loss, climate change, pollution, and fungal diseases. Continue reading →

Dream Of The Octopus

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The topic of octopus spiked last year for various reasons, but we have been interested in these creatures for much longer. Thanks to Benjamin Thompson and Shamini Bundell for this podcast on Nature’s website:

Do octopuses dream? Neural activity resembles human sleep stages

Brain probes reveal complexities of octopus sleep, and a hormone that could help make calorie-restricted diets more effective.

00:46 Inside the brains of sleeping octopuses

Researchers have probed the brains of octopuses and confirmed previous reports suggesting that these invertebrates have a two-stage sleep cycle similar to that seen in many vertebrates. The team suggests this system may have evolved independently in the two groups, as there are millions of years of evolutionary history between them. However, despite its presumed importance, it is a mystery why this system exists at all.

Research article: Pophale et al.

Nature Video: Do octopuses dream? Brain recordings provide the first clues

Paint It Very White

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In one green-gloved hand, a man wearing goggles holds a paint brush dripping with bright white paint. His other hand holds a plastic container of the white paint under the brush to catch the drops.

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, has created the whitest paint on record with his students. John Underwood/Purdue University

We once again have Cara Buckley to thank:

Scientists at Purdue have created a white paint that, when applied, can reduce the surface temperature on a roof and cool the building beneath it.

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, didn’t set out to make it into the Guinness World Records when he began trying to make a new type of paint. He had a loftier goal: to cool down buildings without torching the Earth. Continue reading →

George Musser Talks With Michael Levin For Nautilus

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Nautilus is not one of our go-to sources for inspiration, but with conversations like this it is obvious we should be paying more attention to their work. Thanks to George Musser for this article:

The Biologist Blowing Our Minds

Michael Levin is uncovering the incredible, latent abilities of living things.

Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has a knack for taking an unassuming organism and showing it’s capable of the darnedest things. He and his team once extracted skin cells from a frog embryo and cultivated them on their own. With no other cell types around, they were not “bullied,” as he put it, into forming skin tissue. Instead, they reassembled into a new organism of sorts, a “xenobot,” a coinage based on the Latin name of the frog species, Xenopus laevis. It zipped around like a paramecium in pond water. Continue reading →

The Diligence Of Local Bees

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Native Bees Yield Hardier Flowers Than Honey Bees, Research Finds

Bees getting the scientific attention they deserve, our thanks to Yale e360 for summarizing and sharing these findings:

Native Bees Yield Hardier Flowers Than Honey Bees, Research Finds

Flowers pollinated by native bees produce fitter offspring than flowers pollinated by honey bees, according to a new study carried out in San Diego, California. Continue reading →

More On Merlin Sheldrake, Fungi & Related Matters

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Merlin Sheldrake, author of the best-selling book “Entangled Life.” Alexander Coggin for The New York Times

We are grateful to any publication that gives this topic its due attention, in this case the New York Times and a particular thanks to Jennifer Kahn for such a thoughtfully written profile:

A vast fungal web braids together life on Earth. Merlin Sheldrake wants to help us see it.

One evening last winter, Merlin Sheldrake, the mycologist and author of the best-selling book “Entangled Life,” was headlining an event in London’s Soho. The night was billed as a “salon,” and the crowd, which included the novelist Edward St. Aubyn, was elegant and arty, with lots of leggy women in black tights and men in perfectly draped camel’s-hair coats. “Entangled Life” is a scientific study of all things fungal that reads like a fairy tale, and since the book’s publication in 2020, Sheldrake has become a coveted speaker.

A pied bleu (Lepista personata), also known as the field blewit. Alexander Coggin for The New York Times

At talks like these, Sheldrake is sometimes asked to answer a question he poses in the first chapter of his book: What is it like to be a fungus? The answer, at least according to Sheldrake, is at once alien and wondrous. “If you had no head, no heart, no center of operations,” he began. “If you could taste with your whole body. If you could take a fragment of your toe or your hair and it would grow into a new you — and hundreds of these new yous could fuse together into some impossibly large togetherness. And when you wanted to get around, you would produce spores, this little condensed part of you that could travel in the air.” There were nods. In the audience, the woman next to me gave a long, affirming hum. Continue reading →

Birds, Citizen Science & You

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Seth has been working in various African countries recently, and is somewhere in Kenya at this moment, for work. There is a school in the vicinity, with these signs. We have not yet had the chance to hear any details about the school, but these signs anyway say most of what we might want to know.

His work, related to forest management, clearly intersects with his longstanding interest in birds, strengthened by his three years working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. That period coincides with our learning about citizen science and in the years since we have shared many stories from the field.

The pictures arrived from Kenya just as this initiative between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the New York Times comes to my attention, which you might find interesting:

Mike McQuade

Go Birding With The Times

Our understanding of birds has been profoundly shaped by the work of everyday people. After all, anyone can step outside and pay attention to an untamed world swooping above. Continue reading →

Greenland’s Rock Flour

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Guardian graphic. Source: Guardian research

Damian Carrington, Environment editor at the Guardian, shares these findings:

Eight-thousand-year-old marine deposits, exposed by the slow rise of Greenland after the last ice age. The cliffs are about 15 metres high. Photograph: Minik Rosing

Rock ‘flour’ from Greenland can capture significant CO2, study shows

Powder produced by ice sheets could be used to help tackle climate crisis when spread on farm fields

Rock “flour” produced by the grinding under Greenland’s glaciers can trap climate-heating carbon dioxide when spread on farm fields, research has shown for the first time.

Natural chemical reactions break down the rock powder and lead to CO2 from the air being fixed in new carbonate minerals. Continue reading →

Bubbles On Ice

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Illustration by Arina Kokoreva

A bit late considering the special issue was published one month ago, but here is another article in a recent series featuring unusual ideas about how to address climate change:

A Heat Shield for the Most Important Ice on Earth

Engineers might be able to protect Arctic ice by coating it with tiny glass bubbles. Should they?

An aerial view of the glass-bubble-covered ice, at left, and the bare ice. Photograph by Doug Johnson

On a clear morning in late March, in rural Lake Elmo, Minnesota, I followed two materials scientists, Tony Manzara and Doug Johnson, as they tromped down a wintry hill behind Manzara’s house. The temperature was in the high thirties; a foot of snow covered the ground and sparkled almost unbearably in the sunlight. Both men wore dark shades. “You don’t need a parka,” Johnson told me. “But you need sunglasses—snow blindness, you know?” At the bottom of the hill, after passing some turkey tracks, we reached a round, frozen pond, about a hundred feet across. Manzara, a gregarious man with bushy eyebrows, and Johnson, a wiry cross-country skier with a quiet voice, stepped confidently onto the ice. Continue reading →

Butterfly Origin Story

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A blue morpho butterfly sits on a leaf. A new study finds that butterflies likely originated somewhere in western North America or Central America around 100 million years ago. Kristen Grace/Florida Museum

It is almost a certainty that if you visit Costa Rica you will see the blue morpho fluttering by somewhere. And you may be in the location of its origin story:

Butterflies originated in North America after splitting from moths, new study suggests

Akito Kawahara remembers being eight years old when he went on a special tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He marveled at the vast array of pinned bugs before stopping in front of a large picture of the butterfly family tree.

A red lacewing butterfly perches on a plant. Rachit Pratap Singh

A number of spots on that tree, he saw, were curiously blank.

“Just looking at it, realizing that scientists at these museums still don’t know these basic things — I’ll never forget that day,” Kawahara says.

That moment sparked a lifelong passion in Kawahara to fill in those blanks and determine where these charismatic insects originated. Now, he’s gotten a little closer to an answer. His latest research shows that butterflies probably first flapped their wings in present-day western North America or Central America. Continue reading →

The Lab Of Peter Girguis

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Giant tubeworms take up chemicals from a hydrothermal vent 6,200 feet deep in the Gulf of California (the Girguis lab is world-renowned for research on these worms). Photograph courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute

Our thanks to Veronique Greenwood (after a few years’ absence from our notice) for her most recent article in Harvard Magazine:

Top: a remote dive at Emery Knoll, a deepwater reef off Southern California, reveals crabs, sponges, and corals. Bottom: a rare sighting of the massive seven-arm octopus, Haliphron atlanticus. Photographs courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute

Peter Girguis on terra firma in the lab. Photograph by Jim Harrison

Plumbing the Deep Sea

Peter Girguis probes life on the ocean floor

In a cavernous underground space behind Harvard’s Biological Laboratories, biochemist Peter Girguis frowns at the pressure vessel in his hand. The machined titanium cylinder, about the size of a French press, gleams as he works to release the cap, and he chuckles at his own stubbornness. He could probably find a tool to loosen it, he remarks. Continue reading →