• A region of West Antarctica is behaving differently from most of the continent’s ice: A large patch of ice there is thickening, unlike other parts of West Antarctica that are losing ice. Whether this thickening trend will continue affects the overall amount that melting or collapsing glaciers could raise the level of the world’s oceans.

  • 56 million years ago, the Earth experienced an exceptional episode of global warming. In a very short time on a geological scale, within 10 to 20’000 years, the average temperature increased by 5 to 8 degrees, only returning to its original level a few hundred thousand years later. Based on the analysis of sediments from the southern slope of the Pyrenees, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) measured the impact of this warming on river floods and the surrounding landscapes: the amplitude of floods increased by  a factor of eight - and sometimes even by a factor of 14 -, and vegetated landscapes may have been replaced by arid pebbly plains. Their disturbing conclusions, to be discovered in Scientific Reports, show that the consequences of such global warming may have been much greater than predicted by current climate models.

  • ​Dr Max Ortiz Catalan at Chalmers has developed a new theory for the origin of the mysterious condition, ‘phantom limb pain’. Published in the journal Frontiers in Neurology, his hypothesis builds upon his previous work on a revolutionary treatment for the condition, that uses machine learning and augmented reality.​

  • Buried deep in the muck beneath ancient Arctic lakes, there are clues that can help scientists learn what the climate was like thousands of years ago — and what it could be in the future.

  • A team of engineers and students from UNH’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM) recently returned from a voyage that deployed the first autonomous (robotic) surface vessel — the Bathymetric Explorer and Navigator (BEN) — from a NOAA ship far above the Arctic Circle.

  • More intense and prolonged excessively hot temperatures in The Lone Star State have raised concerns over how global warming may impact this upward trend.

  • Wind turbines could cover 40 percent of the current electricity consumption in Germany.

  • A geostationary hyperspectral infrared sounder can provide significant support to meteorologists to improve local severe-storm forecasting, according to Dr. Jun Li, Distinguished Scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and one of the authors of a recently published study. 

  • Losing a single night’s sleep may affect the liver’s ability to produce glucose and process insulin, increasing the risk of metabolic diseases such as hepatic steatosis (fatty liver) and type 2 diabetes. The findings of the mouse study are published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology—Endocrinology and Metabolism. The research was chosen as an APSselect article for September.

  • Small, New World monkeys called marmosets can mimic the sleep disturbances, changes in circadian rhythm, and cognitive impairment people with Parkinson’s disease develop, according to a new study by scientists at Texas Biomedical Research Institute.