• University of Adelaide researchers have discovered how grapes “breathe”, and that shortage of oxygen leads to cell death in the grape. 

  • As ice the melts, the organic carbon found in permafrost is being released once again after ages of confinement in the soil. It is making its way into Arctic and subarctic lakes and ponds, and modifying their composition. The portrait presented by an international team of researchers that includes Professor Isabelle Laurion of INRS shows the influence that thawing permafrost has on surface water biogeochemistry. Published in Limnology and Oceanography Letters, the results demonstrate that organic carbon from permafrost is making its way into the waters of these regions. This type of carbon is particularly good at absorbing sunlight. As a result, these water bodies are getting increasingly darker and stratified, which affects a number of biological processes in these ecosystems.

  • Imagine losing a limb. Now imagine that on top of that loss, you feel pain, not just at the site of amputation, but in the missing limb itself as your brain tries to make sense of scattered signals.

  • When Brady Highway first arrived in Churchill, Manitoba in November 2013 to begin a new position with Parks Canada, it was the morning after a polar bear attacked and seriously injured two people. The event made national headlines.

  • Melting icecaps, mass flooding, megadroughts and erratic weather are no laughing matter. However, a new study shows that humor can be an effective means to inspire young people to pursue climate change activism. At the same time, fear proves to be an equally effective motivator and has the added advantage of increasing people’s awareness of climate change’s risks.

  • Much like detectives study fingerprints to identify the culprit, scientists used NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to find the “fingerprints” of water in the atmosphere of a hot, bloated, Saturn-mass exoplanet some 700 light-years away. And, they found a lot of water. In fact, the planet, known as WASP-39b, has three times as much water as Saturn does.

  • Data centres and smartphones will be the most damaging information and communications technologies to the environment by 2040, according to new research from W Booth School's Lotfi Belkhir.

  • Across the globe, billions of dollars are spent annually on repairing ecosystems damaged by people. Forests denuded by logging. Rivers polluted by industry. Grasslands converted to agriculture.

  • Native wildflowers were surprisingly resilient during California’s most recent drought, even more so than exotic grasses. But signs of their resilience were not evident with showy blooms aboveground. Rather, they were found mostly underground, hidden in the seed bank, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

  • Farmers around the world are turning to nature to help them reduce pesticide use, environmental impact and, subsequently, and in some cases, increasing yields.