CIRES, partners receive NOAA funding to develop global map.

When Florence slogged ashore in North Carolina last week, coastal wetlands offered one of the best lines of defense against the hurricane’s waves and surge.

A growing world population means that more food is needed which in turn may require more land to grow food crops. More agriculture, however, results in increased irrigation, particularly for food crops such as maize and wheat – especially in dry regions. Combined with the use of fertilizer, this leads to salt accumulation in soils. To be able to use saline soils, naturally salt-tolerant plants, the so-called halophytes, are of great interest. The pseudo-cereal quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) is one of them. Quinoa originated in the Andean region and is adapted to harsh environmental conditions. In the South American mountain range, the cereal-like plant has been used as a food crop for 7000 years. Gluten-free and high in vitamins, the edible seeds have now found their way into European supermarkets.

Researchers led by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have identified another way the process that causes oil to form droplets in water may contribute to solid tumors, such as prostate and breast cancer. The findings appear today in the journal Molecular Cell.

Gorgonians are replacing scleractinian corals that are disappearing from marine ecosystems due to human impact and global climate change. This is the result of a study carried out by researcher of the Institute of Science and Environmental Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Sergio Rossi, which analyzes the reason why the gorgonians (or octocorals) are proving to be one of the "winning" species in this transition process triggered by the spiraling death rates and degradation of corals in the deep sea and reefs.

There are currently millions of heavily underutilized devices in the World. The storage, networking, sensing and computational power of laptops, smartphones, routers or base stations grows with each new version and product release. Why not put all those extra gigabytes of memory and those powerful processing units to work collaboratively and expand the services available to all of us?

The words “fly like an eagle” are famously part of a song, but they may also be words that make some scientists scratch their heads. Especially when it comes to soaring birds like eagles, falcons and hawks, who seem to ascend to great heights over hills, canyons and mountain tops with ease. Scientists realize that upward currents of warm air assist the birds in their flight, but they don’t know how the birds find and navigate these thermal plumes.

Targeted engineering projects to hold off glacier melting could slow down the collapse of ice sheets and limit sea-level rise, according to a new study published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere. While an intervention similar in size to existing large civil engineering projects could only have a 30% chance of success, a larger project would have better odds of holding off ice-sheet collapse. But study authors Michael Wolovick and John Moore caution that reducing emissions still remains key to stopping climate change and its dramatic effects.

Brandon Samuels plans to set up cameras this January in hopes of catching footage of birds crashing into windows across campus. Honestly, he really is a nice guy – it’s for science.

At least 80 U.S. Geological Survey scientists are in the field in the Carolinas and Virginia, working to ensure that vital information about river flooding continues to reach emergency managers, forecasters and others threatened by the catastrophic flooding that has been linked to 32 deaths.