Impact of rising sea temperatures on marine life — ScienceDaily

Global warming or climate change. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is that right now it is having a direct and dramatic effect on marine environments across our planet. “More immediately pressing than future climate change is the increasing frequency and severity of extreme ‘underwater heatwaves’ that we are already seeing around […]
Vaccinating the most vulnerable first may not have the greatest impact on COVID-19, new model suggests

Image created by Charlie Bulmer. Submitted for United Nations Global Call Out To Creatives With the second wave of COVID-19 in full force — with some countries even experiencing a third wave — health authorities around the world are facing unprecedented challenges in trying to balance minimizing the virus’ spread with citizen’s livelihoods and the […]
White-nose syndrome predicted to drastically impact hibernating bat species in the West — ScienceDaily

A four-year study recently published in Ecology and Evolution concludes that the fungal disease, white-nose syndrome, poses a severe threat to many western North American bats. Since it was first detected in 2006, white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats in eastern and central North America. The spread of the fungal pathogen that causes white-nose […]
Difference by the year 2100 expected to impact global biodiversity, food security — ScienceDaily

Future climate change will cause a regionally uneven shifting of the tropical rain belt — a narrow band of heavy precipitation near the equator — according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions. This development may threaten food security for billions of people. In a study published today in Nature Climate […]
Can a mother’s stress impact children’s disease development? University of Cincinnati environmental health researcher says there is a connection between trauma and DNA mutation — ScienceDaily

Stress on an expectant mother could affect her baby’s chance of developing disease — perhaps even over the course of the child’s life, UC researchers have found. Psychosocial factors creating stress — such as lack of social support, loneliness, marriage status or bereavement — may be mutating their child’s mitochondrial DNA and could be a […]
A global assessment of the impact of groundwater on ocean chemistry is important for understanding the weathering of rocks and its effects on climate — ScienceDaily

An invisible flow of groundwater seeps into the ocean along coastlines all over the world. Scientists have tended to disregard its contributions to ocean chemistry, focusing on the far greater volumes of water and dissolved material entering the sea from rivers and streams, but a new study finds groundwater discharge plays a more significant role […]
What is direct heating and how does it impact our future?

In modern times, we are already seeing the effects of disease on our population through COVID-19. But what events could cause a global human extinction? What happens if human civilization continues business as usual? How many humans could feasibly be supported by the Earth, and at what cost? In 1975, scientist Sebastian Von Hoerner attempted […]
COVID-19’s impact on cancer prevention and control in Africa

When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Africa, the continent was already struggling to deal with another public health crisis – a growing cancer epidemic characterized by more than one million new cancer cases and nearly 700,000 deaths per year. In a Perspective, Beatrice Wiafe Addai and Wilfred Ngwa discuss the significant challenges COVID-19 imposed on cancer […]
Organic meats found to have approximately the same greenhouse impact as regular meats

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A trio of researchers from the Technical University of Munich, the University of Greifswald and the University of Augsburg have found that the meat production process for organic meats produces approximately the same amounts of greenhouse gases as does the conventional meat production process. In their paper published in the journal […]
Light-controlled genes could reveal how gut bacteria impact health — ScienceDaily

Baylor College of Medicine researcher Meng Wang had already shown that bacteria that make a metabolite called colanic acid (CA) could extend the lifespan of worms in her lab by as much as 50%, but her collaboration with Rice University synthetic biologist Jeffrey Tabor is providing tools to answer the bigger question of how the […]