The term "aging" generally conjures up images of graying hair, slowing pace, and the eventual appearance of wrinkles. Yet, beyond these physical markers, aging is a fundamentally cellular and molecular process, even for organisms like bacteria, which also experience age-related changes.



From humble single-celled organisms to complex mammalian systems, all living organisms experience the impact of passing time, according to a recent report from the <a href="https://asm.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">American Society for Microbiology</a>.



As they age, cells accumulate damage that impairs function, leading to numerous age-related disorders in humans. But what about bacteria? Can these single-celled entities feel the passage of time?



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-bacteria-age-and-binary-fission-factor">Bacteria age and binary fission factor</h2>



<a href="https://www.earth.com/news/bacteria-use-biological-clocks-to-predict-and-survive-cold-weather/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bacteria</a>, being single-celled organisms, propagate differently from humans. Rather than sexual reproduction, they undergo a process known as binary fission. 



In this process, they duplicate their DNA and divide into two, resulting in rapid replication. Interestingly, the fastest-growing bacterium can split in less than 10 minutes.



Historically, it was believed that bacteria, thanks to binary fission's symmetrical nature, did not age. After all, this process results in a parent and offspring identical in age, leading to a concept dubbed "functional immortality."



Aging, it was assumed, required an asymmetric division where the parent is older than the offspring.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-aging-of-bacteria">Aging of bacteria</h2>



Contrary to the longstanding belief, evidence emerged in 2005, suggesting that, like us, <a href="https://www.earth.com/news/bacteria-and-imprint-new-era-dna-transformation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bacteria</a> do age. The researchers found that Escherichia coli (E. coli) exhibit differences between "old" and "new" (parent and offspring) cells.



These distinctions became evident as scientists watched the cells divide under a microscope, noting that older cells' growth rate and offspring production decline over time. 



Moreover, the senior cells died more frequently than their younger counterparts. Clearly, despite similar appearances, cells underwent divisions that left them functionally asymmetric and susceptible to aging.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-asymmetry-to-the-rescue">Asymmetry to the rescue</h2>



So, how does this asymmetry help? It turns out, this type of division is crucial for the population's overall fitness. 



An asymmetric division maintains variance, the variety upon which natural selection acts. More variation typically means a better chance of survival under changing conditions.



One of the key players in this aging process is protein aggregation. This process occurs in bacteria and eukaryotic cells and is associated with age-related diseases in humans, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, where harmful protein clumps can lead to cell death.



In <a href="https://www.earth.com/news/hungry-bacteria-will-devour-plastic-waste/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bacteria</a>, scientists found a smart way of dealing with this problem. As a feature of asymmetric division, older cells accumulate these proteins segregating age-related damage and keeping their offspring looking "younger" at the molecular level.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-cellular-states-of-stress">Cellular states of stress</h2>



Another culprit contributing to aging, both in humans and bacteria, is stress. E. coli cells activate a stress state inside the cell to survive mutations accumulated over their lifetimes. 



Some of these mutations, while not lethal, can negatively impact the cell's fitness by causing a critical protein to lose its function.



In a study analyzing the effects of over 60 different nonlethal loss-of-function mutations in E. coli, researchers found that these mutants increased their metabolic activity to compensate for lost protein function. 



Still, this adaptation comes at a cost. These cells grow slower and enter a state similar to purgatory faster than non-mutants, especially in nutrient-poor environments.



The findings suggest an "aging cost" associated with maintaining resistance to stress on a population level. Could understanding bacterial aging lead us to new antibiotic targets? Might this ancient mechanism of aging shed light on certain human diseases perpetuated through cellular stress states?



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-complexities-of-aging">Complexities of aging</h2>



Time and age certainly doesn't stand still for anyone, humans and <a href="https://www.earth.com/news/how-soil-bacteria-contribute-to-atmospheric-co2/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bacteria</a> included. But perhaps bacteria's susceptibility to aging is a blessing in disguise. 



These hardy organisms make excellent subjects for studying the nuances of aging, given their rapid growth and the ability to observe numerous generations in a single experiment. After all, understanding the complexity of aging is inherent to unlocking the mysteries of life itself.



The discovery that bacteria are not eternal beings, as once thought, but vulnerable to aging like all living organisms, signifies the interconnectedness of life at every level.



The concept of time, aging, and the decline in function straddle across the biological spectrum, making it possible to draw parallels between the simplest life forms and the most complex ones.



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Do bacteria age or are they immortal?

The term "aging" generally conjures up images of graying hair, slowing pace, and the eventual appearance of wrinkles. Yet, beyond these physical markers, aging is a fundamentally cellular and molecular process, even for organisms like bacteria, which also experience age-related changes. From humble single-celled organisms to complex mammalian systems, all living organisms experience the impact of passing time, according to a recent report from the American Society for Microbiology. As they age, cells accumulate damage that impairs function, leading to numerous age-related disorders in humans. But what...

<div>Scientists at Imperial College London have discovered a feedback mechanism at the heart of photosynthesis that protects plants from damage by light.</div>
<div>

The researchers have discovered that the key enzyme in photosynthesis can tune its activity to avoid being damaged by light and oxygen.

Knowing how photosynthesis is regulated and protected could allow scientists to improve the process, potentially making agriculture and food production more efficient.

For example, understanding how this regulatory mechanism works could help researchers to identify the factors that are beneficial for plant growth and to define how to adjust these in order to optimise growth in controlled cultivation.

Photosystem II, the central enzyme in photosynthesis, uses solar energy to remove electrons from water. The electrons are used to fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, creating a form of carbon that constitutes the fuel and building blocks for life. Photosystem II changed the planet by putting most of the energy into the biosphere and all of the oxygen into the atmosphere.

When leaves close their pores to prevent water loss, this also prevents air exchange so that carbon dioxide cannot enter the system. As the carbon dioxide inside the leaf is used up, the electrons have nothing left to react with and so they build up.

Although carbon dioxide is not entering the system, light still is, generating excess electrons. As the electrons have nowhere to go, they instead engage in 'back-reactions' that form a 'killer molecule' called singlet oxygen. This killer molecule can damage the photosystem II enzyme.

Now, by using a technique called spectro-electrochemistry, researchers have discovered a mechanism that protects the enzyme from this damage. The trapped electrons trigger the release of a bicarbonate molecule from the enzyme, which was previously thought to be constantly bound to it.

The new study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this bicarbonate release not only slows down the water-splitting reaction but crucially also protects the enzyme from light damage due to the harmful back-reactions.

Bicarbonate is formed when carbon dioxide dissolves in water, so its concentration is related to the amount of carbon dioxide in the local environment. As well as low carbon dioxide levels causing electrons to build up and trigger the release of bicarbonate, the study also suggests the possibility that the level of carbon dioxide itself in the local leaf environment could impact on the bicarbonate binding.

"This is such an intuitive feedback mechanism at the heart of biology that I think it will go into school textbooks," said lead author, Professor Bill Rutherford FRS from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial.

"Now that we understand this new mechanism in the lab, the next step is to define when it kicks in out there in the field - not to mention the forest, greenhouse, plant pot, sea, lake and pond."

Dr Andrea Fantuzzi, co-lead author also from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, added: "The role of bicarbonate has long been a mystery. Otto Warburg, Nobel laureate, friend of Einstein and one of the twentieth century's leading biochemists, puzzled over this problem in the 1950s.

"Now the mystery is solved and a new regulatory mechanism defined. Not only is the question solved, but it could have real implications for understanding limitations to plant growth."


</div>
--

Credit: <a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Imperial College London</a>
<div></div>

Plants have a mechanism that protects them from damage by light

Scientists at Imperial College London have discovered a feedback mechanism...

In 2010, Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano -- its crater covered by glacier ice -- erupted, spewing clouds of ash that led to delays in flights to and from Europe. Now Katla, another Iceland volcano, is rumbling. To mark Earth Science Week, Oct. 9-15, 2016, the National Science Foundation (NSF) spoke with geologist Benjamin Edwards of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., and Sonia Esperanca, a volcanologist and program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences, about Eyjafjallajökull and other volcanoes hidden under glaciers. NSF's Division of Earth Sciences supports Edwards' research.

Q: How often do volcanoes covered by snow and ice erupt?

Esperanca: Volcanoes at high latitudes on continents are often covered by ice and snow, sometimes through the summer months. Volcanologists are always concerned when a volcano beneath a glacier becomes active. When scalding-hot lava melts vast amounts of ice and snow, for example, severe mudflows may result.

Q: Is Eyjafjallajökull Iceland's only glacier-covered volcano?

Edwards: Iceland has many glacierized volcanoes [volcanoes at least partly covered by ice], including the recent earthquake-rattled Katla, Grímsvötn, Bárðarbunga and others. However, even Iceland's ice-free volcanoes like Hekla can have ash-rich eruptions. The key to knowing where ash will go during an Iceland eruption is to follow the Northern Hemisphere jet streams. Sometimes, they flow across Iceland and head into the Arctic, where much of the ash falls into the ocean; at other times they can quickly whisk the ash into northern Europe.

Q: Did lava from the 2010 eruption flow beneath the glacier's ice?

Edwards: Yes, a lava flow traveled down the Gigjökull glacier, which covers Eyjafjallajökull. In part, the lava followed pathways left by floods that melted ice at the beginning of the eruption. Other lava flows twisted and turned along pre-existing drainage tunnels beneath the ice. We found lava in these passageways when we first visited the eruption site in 2011. Since then, the roofs of most of these ice tunnels have completely melted.

[caption id="attachment_88956" align="alignleft" width="150"]<img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-88956" src="http://www.earth.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Gigjökull-glacier_1big_NSF-150x150.jpg" alt="Gigjökull glacier" width="150" height="150" /> Gigjökull glacier[/caption]

Q: Is this the first time under-ice lava has been observed?

Edwards: Although this isn't the first time lava has traveled beneath ice at a modern-day volcanic eruption, these ice-lava deposits are probably the best documented. Our team made several flights over the eruption site during and immediately afterward. While the lava was flowing, however, the area was too dangerous for close observations.

Q: Does under-ice lava create special hazards for people living downstream?

Edwards: It can. Our work shows that ice-melting increased from lava traveling beneath the glacier. The rate of melting depends on how fast the lava is flowing and how much ice comes into contact with it, or is close enough to be affected by the lava's heat. Explosive glaciovolcanic eruptions usually produce the most rapid ice-melting.

Q: The process of lava flowing under ice must create beautiful, if ephemeral, structures in a glacier. Did you see tunnels, arches and other formations?

Edwards: We observed lots of arches in the ice in 2011, but these were mostly gone by 2012. Overall the response of Gigjökull glacier to the eruption was mixed. A canyon carved in the upper part of the glacier had "healed itself" by 2012. However, the damage to the lower part of the glacier seems to have been severe enough that, coupled with melting due to climate change, the end of the glacier lost about half its width. It doesn't seem like it's going to recover, based on views in 2014.

Q: Does ice "cool" burning-hot lava?

Edwards: Theoretically, lava can melt about five to ten times its own volume of ice -- if all the heat from the lava, which could be 1,200 degrees Celsius [about 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit], melts the ice. But nature generally is not that efficient, in part because meltwater can quickly carry heat away from the lava-ice interface. Also, because about 20 percent of the potential heat released by the lava comes from crystals that grow inside the lava, quickly turning it into glass, some of the potential heat is lost.

Q: Can new snowfall "rebuild" a glacier that has lost ice to an eruption?

Edwards: Yes, depending on how badly the ice was damaged and how much snow falls. At Veniaminof Volcano in Alaska, lava flows come out of a cone that sits above a caldera filled with ice. The flows melt into the ice for 30 to 50 meters [98 to 164 feet], but after one or two years are again covered by ice and snow. At Gigjökull in Iceland, part of the glacier seemed to recover very quickly, and other parts seem to have been damaged beyond repair.

Q: Is there anywhere else on Earth such glacier-volcanoes exist and have erupted, or might in the near future?

Edwards: Our work shows that at least 180 volcanoes around the globe have glaciers that have been mapped to within 1 kilometer [about two-thirds of a mile] of a known volcanic vent. More than 400 may be within striking distance: a 5 kilometer [3.1 mile] radius of damage from volcanic ash or lava flows.

Q: Can Iceland residents and visitors get close enough to the Eyjafjallajökull glacier-volcano to see the effects of the 2010 eruption?

Edwards: Yes, anyone can take a bus or a four-wheel drive vehicle to the base of the Gigjökull glacier, with its now-empty lake basin that once contained a glacial lagoon. If you look carefully, you can just see the end of the lava flow.

Eyjafjallajökull volcano: The dangerous volcano beneath a glacier

In 2010, Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano -- its crater covered by...

Today's supercapacitors, energy storage devices capable of quickly delivering a large charge, feature carbon-derived components -- the production of which requires harsh chemicals and large amounts of energy.

Recently, scientists at MIT built a supercapacitor without carbon. In place of carbon, scientists deployed metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs.

"We've found an entirely new class of materials for supercapacitors," Mircea Dincă, an MIT associate professor of chemistry, told MIT News.

MOFs are porous, sponge-like materials with a lot of surface area -- an important quality for supercapacitor materials. Unfortunately, MOFs aren't all that conductive, another important quality.

"One of our long-term goals was to make these materials electrically conductive," Dincă said.

It's a goal some scientists thought was impossible.

Though MOFs don't conduct electricity very well, they do conduct ions, positively charged atoms and molecules. Ion conductivity is a key component of high-functioning electrode. The quality gave researchers hope that an MOF could be used in supercapacitors.

Through trial and error, researchers were able to develop an electrically conductive MOF using nickel.

When researchers made a supercapacitor using the novel material, they matched the performance of today's best carbon-based supercapacitors. In some respects -- like its ability to withstand many charge-discharge cycles -- it outperformed commercial supercapacitors.

Though the production of MOFs currently requires the use of rather expensive materials, the production process involves fewer toxic chemicals.

Researchers hope their findings -- detailed in the journal Nature Materials -- are just the beginning. The MOF used by Dincă and his research partners boasts one of the smaller surface areas of the class. New and improved MOFs could offer even greater capacity.

---

Credit: MIT/UPI

Scientists create carbon-free supercapacitor

Today's supercapacitors, energy storage devices capable of quickly delivering a...

New York City can expect 9-foot floods, as intense as that produced by 2012's Superstorm Sandy, at least three times more frequently over the next century - and possibly as much as 17 times more frequently, according to a paper published today by scientists at Rutgers University, Princeton University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study is based on a combination of historical data and computer model projections performed by Ning Lin of Princeton University, Benjamin Horton and Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, and Jeff Donnelly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The historical data consist of tidal gauge records taken from New York City, going back to 1856, and geological records from the same area going back two millennia. The model projections consist of Kopp's work on future sea-level models; Lin's work on future storm intensity; and the work of Horton, Kopp and Donnelly on historical sea levels and storm surges.

The scientists ask the question: How frequent will floods like that produced by Sandy be in the future? Earlier research led by Andra Reed, now a postdoctoral scholar at Rutgers, had shown a 20-fold increase in the frequency of extreme floods, primarily as a result of sea-level rise, between the historic period from 850 to 1850 and the late 20th century.

The historic sea-level rise was largely due to natural effects, like the slow sinking of the land in the mid-Atlantic region in response to the end of the last ice age; but over the late 20th century, human-caused climate change came to dominate sea-level rise.

In the paper published today, the authors report that floods as intense as Sandy's would have occurred about once every 400 years on average under the sea-level rise conditions of the year 2000, but that over the 21st century are expected to be about four times more probable due to an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise.

"The grand answer is that things are going to get worse by 2100," says Horton, who is professor of Marine and Coastal Sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. "If nothing changes with hurricanes, sea-level rise alone will increase the frequency of Sandy-like events by 2100."

But the size, intensity, and tracks of hurricanes may change. In the paper, Princeton's Lin combined historical climate data and modeling of future climate conditions and storm surges. She found that these changes may lead to a more modest three-fold increase in flood probability, but may also break badly against New York City, making Sandy's flood 17 times more probable.

"As we refine climate and hurricane dynamic models, we will have more accurate predictions that will allow planners to better design flood mitigation strategies," said Lin, the study's lead author.

The study built upon past work by Kopp, professor of earth and planetary sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, estimating sea levels over the 21st century. "We ask, 'What is likely?' and 'What are the extremes?'" Kopp said. "We take into account factors that cause local sea level to vary from global sea level. And we've shown, through geological investigations, that our projections are consistent with the assumption that temperature and sea level will be related in the future as they have been over the past two thousand years."

Projections are not predictions and, Horton says, the spread between what's "likely" and "extreme" is an indication of the complexity of future projection. "Things are only going to get worse by 2100," Horton says. "It's just a question of how much worse it will get. There is no happy scenario."

---

Credit: <a href="http://www.rutgers.edu" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rutgers University</a>

Study: New York City will frequently be under water in the next century

New York City can expect 9-foot floods, as intense as...

<div>Human-caused climate change has nearly doubled the amount of land burned in western U.S. forest fires over the past three decades, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Idaho and Columbia University.</div>
The researchers estimate that human-caused climate change caused an additional 16,000 square miles of western forest lands to burn between 1984 and 2015. That's about the size of the Bitterroot, Clearwater, Kootenai, Panhandle and Nez Perce National forests combined, or more than 30 times the size of the city of Los Angeles.

"We're no longer waiting for human-caused climate change to leave its fingerprint on wildfire across the western U.S. It's already here," said John Abatzoglou, the study's lead author and an associate professor of geography in UI's College of Science. "Over the last several decades we've seen longer fire seasons, larger fires and more area burned -- and those observations led us to ask, 'Why?' What we found was that human-caused climate change played a resounding role in observed increases in forest fire activity."

The study, which will be published in the Oct. 10 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to quantify the degree to which human-caused climate change has increased wildfire activity in western U.S. forests. The study examined forested regions of the lower 48 states from the Rockies to the Pacific.

"Knowing that human-caused warming is responsible for approximately half of the western U.S. forest fire area in the past few decades, and understanding that this effect is becoming increasingly dominant, helps us better anticipate continued changes in forest fire activity in the coming decades," said co-author Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

"This knowledge will allow us to make more educated fire and land management decisions."

The United States has seen dramatic fire seasons in recent years. In 2015, 10.1 million acres burned across the country -- the largest since the National Interagency Fire Center began documenting wildland fire area in 1983. Federal firefighting costs for the 2015 fire season hit a record-high $2.1 billion.

The uptick in fire activity over the past decade has led to some calling recent wildfire seasons the "new normal." Abatzoglou and Williams goal was to parse out how much of the observed increase in the extent of forest fires was due to natural climate variability and other factors, and how much was rooted in human-caused climate change. They chose to focus on forest fires, since grassland fires respond differently to climate variability.

Abatzoglou likened the many factors that lead to forest fires to instruments in an orchestra: When any instrument plays louder, the volume of the whole orchestra increases. His and Williams' research finds that both human-caused climate change and natural variability have been playing with increasing volume in recent decades, leading to record-breaking fire seasons.

The history of fire suppression and forest management practices in parts of the West has also played an important role in the increase. Fewer fires have led to overgrowth in many forests, so there is now more fuel available to burn when conditions get dry.

"The legacy of fire suppression has probably amplified the effect of climate change on forest fire. Opposite to how climate change would have zero effect on forest fire activity if there was zero fuel to burn, climate change probably has had an amplified effect of forest fire activity due to an artificially high number of trees in many forested areas due to past fire suppression," Williams said.

Increased temperature and reduced relative humidity facilitate fire activity by drying out timber. Such conditions allow fires to start and spread and make them more difficult to suppress.

"Wildfire is a function of several processes, some natural and some human. But what we know is on a year-to-year basis, warm, dry summers enable large fire seasons," Abatzoglou said. "There is a remarkable relationship between the extent of forested area burned and fuel dryness that allows us to implicate climate as the preeminent driver of annual variability in forest fire over the past three decades."

Abatzoglou and Williams complied data from eight measures of aridity, or dryness, in western U.S. forests. They then used climate model experiments to identify how human-caused climate change influenced these aridity measures.

They found that spring and summer temperatures warmed by 2 to 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius) since 1950, which is in agreement with the warming that climate models attribute to human-caused climate change. This warming led to significant drying within western U.S. forests, accounting for approximately 55 percent of the documented increases in forest aridity from 1979 to 2015. The remaining 45 percent was due to natural climate variations that caused reductions in humidity and precipitation in some regions.

This influence has been particularly notable since the turn of the century: Abatzoglou and Williams estimate that since 2000, human-caused climate change led to a 75-percent increase in the extent of forested lands with elevated aridity and contributed about nine additional days per year with exceptionally dry fuels and high fire potential.

While human-caused climate change and natural climate variability have conspired to increase aridity in recent decades, natural variability could possibly revert and reduce aridity in coming decades, Abatzoglou said. However, unmitigated human-caused climate change will likely have a growing effect on fire seasons -- like the drum section of the orchestra growing louder and louder.

"Is this the new normal? I'd say no, but we're heading there," Abatzoglou said. "We expect that the effects of human-caused climate change will intensify over the next several decades. So long as there are trees in our forests, climate change will continue to set the table for large fire seasons."

"The impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests" is available from PNAS through EurekAlert.
###
Credit: <a href="http://www.uidaho.edu" target="_blank" rel="noopener">University of Idaho</a>

About UI

The University of Idaho, home of the Vandals, is one of only 72 land-grant research universities in the United States. From its residential campus in Moscow, UI serves the state of Idaho through educational centers in Coeur d'Alene, Boise, Idaho Falls and Twin Falls, and Extension offices in 42 counties. Home to more than 11,000 students statewide, UI is a leader in student-centered learning and excels at interdisciplinary research, service to businesses and communities, and in advancing diversity, citizenship and global outreach. UI competes in the Big Sky Conference and Sun Belt Conference. Learn more: <a href="http://www.uidaho.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://www.uidaho.edu</a>.

&nbsp;

US forest fires have doubled from human-caused climate change

Human-caused climate change has nearly doubled the amount of land...

When Christa Savva returned to the Sandy Shoes Beach Resort a day after Hurricane Matthew brushed by Melbourne Beach, Florida, she looked at the beach in front of the pink-flamingo-colored hotel and noticed half the sand dunes had disappeared.
Savva guesses three-quarters of the missing dunes washed into the ocean and the remaining quarter scattered onto the resort's beachfront property, which was undamaged by the hurricane.
"I was like, 'Oh, my goodness!'" Savva, a property manager for the Space-Age-era hotel, said Sunday. "It's crazy to have the dunes gone and all you see is empty space."
The sand dunes on Florida's beaches are the equivalent of tourism gold, and its disappearance over time threatens the state's No. 1 industry. While Hurricane Matthew didn't ravage Florida's coast as a series of storms did a dozen years ago, it collapsed dunes, washing away sand that protected buildings and roads during storms, and will likely require the spending of millions of dollars on beach restoration projects.
In Jacksonville Beach, the top of the dunes collapsed onto the lower part of the dunes, creating 10-foot high cliffs of sand, rather than the usual gentle slopes of the dunes.
Federal, state and local officials respond to beach erosion by depositing new sand in areas where it has disappeared, and the sand dunes act as barriers to infrastructure. Before these projects took off three decades ago, sea walls were often the only thing that stood between water, winds and buildings during storms.
"The good news is a lot of people don't realize our beaches are engineered. It looks natural, but we construct the sand so it's sacrificed during hurricanes and protects roads and structures and potentially human lives," said Jackie Keiser, a Jacksonville-area official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
While a statewide evaluation of beach erosion has yet to be completed, individual Atlantic-coast counties from south of the Space Coast up to the Georgia border were assessing the lost sand.
A $13.5 million project to replenish Jacksonville-area beaches with 650,000 thousand cubic yards of sand over seven miles was underway before Hurricane Matthew. Keiser said she is certain that same amount of sand was lost from the hurricane and the amount of sand needed for the project will likely double.
Virginia Barker, the natural resources director for Brevard County, the area of Florida often referred to as the Space Coast, said the erosion from Hurricane Matthew appears to be more in the category of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 than a devastating series of hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. After Sandy, 2.4 million cubic yards of sand were needed to replenish 14 miles of Brevard County's shoreline. The replenishment was far smaller than what was required after Hurricane Frances and Hurricane Jeanne made landfall just south of the Space Coast a dozen years ago.
"This is world-famous Cocoa Beach. People come here for the sandy experience," Barker said. "It's tremendously important to our economy. The alternative is to allow erosion and let the sea go up and there will be no sandy beach."
In Georgia, it's too early to tell the extent of beach erosion, but water did get past huge boulders placed along the shore to buffer properties and stop erosion, said Megan Desrosiers, CEO of One Hundred Miles, a Georgia coastal advocacy group.
"The thing about Georgia is, we haven't had a storm like this since the 1880s so it's hard to know how to prepare when no one remembers the last time there was a storm like this," Desrosiers said. "We don't have experience with this type of storm on the Georgia coast, but Matthew was a perfect example of what we will see more of in the future."
Before Hurricane Matthew, more than half of Florida's 663 miles of beaches were considered critically eroded by the state Department of Environmental Protection. The agency defines "critical erosion" as the disappearance of beach or dune to a degree that it affects the environment, development or recreational activities. About half of Florida's 411 miles of beaches deemed to have "critical erosion" are part of a beach replenishment program.
Before the storm, Brevard County had 41 miles of critical erosion, the area around Daytona Beach had almost 20 miles of beach erosion, the area around St. Augustine had almost 14 miles of critical erosion and the area around Jacksonville had more than 10 miles.
In Melbourne Beach, now that half of the dunes are gone in front of the Sandy Shoes, the high tide can lap up to the steps that lead to the hotel's wooden deck overlooking the beach.
"There's still a beach, and everything ... but it's just a lot flatter," Savva said. "High tide is something you're going to have to watch out for now."
---
Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/mikeschneiderap">http://twitter.com/mikeschneiderap</a> . His work can be found at <a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/content/Mike-Schneider">http://bigstory.ap.org/content/Mike-Schneider</a> .
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Hurricane Matthew destroys protective sand dunes along Florida coast

When Christa Savva returned to the Sandy Shoes Beach Resort...

Washington lawmakers have tried and failed in recent years to make polluters pay for their carbon emissions to fight climate change. Now, voters will get to decide.
An initiative on the November ballot asks voters whether the state should impose the nation's first direct carbon tax on the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline.
Sponsors say residents have a moral responsibility to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and a carbon tax is the best way to do it. The tax encourages businesses to conserve or switch to clean energy by making fossil fuels more expensive, and it makes the tax system fairer by using the revenues to reduce other taxes, they say.
Businesses say the tax will drive up fuel and energy costs and put Washington companies at a competitive disadvantage.
And in a move that has bewildered some, major environmental and other groups - including those that backed Gov. Jay Inslee's proposal last year to cap emissions and make carbon polluters pay - oppose the initiative. They say it takes the wrong approach.
Yoram Bauman, an economist who founded Carbon Washington, the grassroots group that gathered more than 350,000 signatures to qualify Initiative 732, defended it as great climate and tax policy.
"It does almost everything right for Washington," he said.
Audubon Washington supports it.
"Our members came down on the side of urgency. We don't have time to wait," said Gail Gatton, the group's executive director. "Climate change is happening, and this is our best available option right now to protect birds."
But the Sierra Club, Washington Environmental Council and the advocacy group Front and Centered say the initiative is the wrong carbon-pricing approach and will hurt the state's revenues. Whereas Inslee's pollution fee would have raised money for education, transportation, clean energy and programs to help disadvantaged communities affected by climate change, Initiative 732 provides no such investments, critics say.
"It's not a path that makes sense for our communities," said Rich Stolz, executive director of OneAmerica, which works on social justice issues. Stolz said the initiative ignores climate justice and lacks input from communities of color.
Stolz's group is part of a coalition that worked on an alternative carbon-pricing measure. Last-minute talks between that coalition and I-732 supporters to collaborate on one ballot measure fizzled last year.
The initiative is designed to be revenue neutral, meaning the tax revenue increase from fossil fuels would be mostly offset by decreases in other taxes. In this case, revenues would be returned to people and businesses by cutting the state sales tax by one point, virtually eliminating business taxes for manufacturers and providing rebates for working families, sponsors say.
A state analysis, however, estimates the measure could cost the state about $800 million in lost revenues over the first six fiscal years. Initiative sponsors dispute the state's analysis, saying it double-counted the rebates in the first year.
The carbon tax is modeled after one in the nearby Canadian province of British Columbia. California has a cap-and-trade program, which limits emissions and allows carbon polluters to buy and trade pollution credits. If approved, Washington's carbon tax starts at $15 a ton of carbon emissions in July, goes up to $25 the next year and incrementally increases afterward.
The Washington State Tree Fruit Association, which represents growers, packers and marketers, is among those opposed.
It takes a lot of fuel to grow and transport produce, and the tax will be paid by those in the state, not competitors outside it, said Jon Devaney, the group's president.
"Raising food prices in Washington state will make us less competitive compared to others," he said.
Initiative sponsors say a $25 carbon tax would raise the price of gasoline by about 25 cents per gallon and the price of coal-fired electricity by about 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. They say power plants and fuel suppliers likely will pass those costs on to consumers, but that consumers will see price reductions in other things they buy because the sales tax is cut. The tax wouldn't apply to electricity from renewables like hydro, wind or solar power.
The campaign has raised $1.2 million from nearly 1,200 unique donors; more than half of those total contributions are under $200.
The No on 732 campaign sponsored by the Association of Washington Business has raised $300,000 to oppose the tax.
© 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Washington state will vote on America's first carbon tax in November

Washington lawmakers have tried and failed in recent years to...

<div>
<div class="img-wrapper">Cheap shale gas produced by fracking has driven the decline in coal production in the United States during the last decade, researchers at the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University have found.</div>
Power plants, which use 93 percent of the coal produced nationally, have been operating under the same EPA regulations signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Proposed new rules since then have all been challenged in court and not implemented until June 2016, when the EPA's restrictions on mercury and other toxic emissions were approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Consumption of coal continued to grow under those 1990-era EPA rules until 2008, and then went into steady decline, dropping by 23 percent from 2008 thru 2015.

The data show the drop in those years to be correlated with the shale revolution, as natural gas production increased by a factor of more than 10 and its price dropped in half, the researchers say. And, due to the continuing--and in some cases accelerating--technological and economic advantages of gas over coal, the decline in coal is expected to continue at least decades into the future.

Their study is published in The Electricity Journal.

"Some people attribute the decline in coal-generated electricity to the EPA's air-quality rules, even calling it 'Obama's war on coal,'" said Mingguo Hong, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Case Western Reserve and co-author of the study. "While we can't say that the EPA rules have no impact--as, for example, discouraging the building of new coal power plants because of the expectation that tougher air-quality rules will clear the courts--the data say the EPA rules have not been the driving force."

Hong, co-director of the Electricity Systems Research Lab at Case Western Reserve, and Walter Culver, a founding member of the Great Lakes Energy Institute Advisory Board at the university, say the data show that shale-gas competition is what's been hurting coal as of today. They expect that, as wind and solar sources of electricity continue to improve, they will be tough competitors to coal in the not-distant future.

The authors examined data available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, academia, specialized energy consultants, and Wall Street analysts and publically available information of the electric utilities and gas industry--in some cases down to the profit and loss statements.

"If you're a power plant operator and you see gas supply is continuing to increase and natural gas can do the job cheaper--by a lot--the decision to switch from coal is pretty easy," Culver said.

The long-term outlook

"As we look toward the future, we see no natural mechanisms that will permit coal to recover," Culver said.

Gas supply continues to grow. Starting in 2009, gas production each year has exceeded U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) annual projections. And the proved gas reserves are outpacing production exponentially, the researchers note. Lastly, pipelines out of Appalachia--where the cheapest and most abundant shale gas is found--are expected next year to increase access to gas in that region by 55 percent above recent production.

There is a valid concern that the supply of natural gas will be limited by a recent debilitating drop in prices that has arisen from over-supply, Culver said. In fact, one driller per month has gone bankrupt in 2015 and early 2016.

But after reviewing the profit-and-loss statements of gas drillers, the researchers believe that a point of price stability exists where both the drillers can be profitable enough to keep drilling and the price to power plants--particularly for gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale deposits in Appalachia--will still be far lower than coal.

Some analysts suggest that exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) will drive down the domestic supply and raise prices. But Hong and Culver say shipping costs, to Asian markets in particular and well-positioned regional competitors, are likely to prevent U.S. LNG from competing easily internationally. That would leave a strong supply here at attractive prices.

Beyond gas price, state regulations and generator technologies have been and will continue to be factors in the loss of coal production, they conclude.

Since 2010, the cost of utility-scale solar power has declined 68 percent and onshore wind 51 percent, making them close to, or already competitive with coal, the researchers say.

Policies in three-quarters of America's states encourage the addition of wind and solar as replacements for coal. As costs have dropped, some states are pushing a faster switch to those renewables.

Because wind and solar fail to provide constant power, fill-in energy sources are needed. Until large-scale batteries or other electricity-storage technologies become more practical, gas is the logical choice over coal to augment the grid, Culver says. Gas plants can be fired up and turned down faster than coal plants, thus lowering costs to consumers and producing less pollution.

Forthcoming EPA air-quality regulations may further disadvantage coal, Hong and Culver say. Burning natural gas, for instance, produces no mercury emissions, half the carbon dioxide of coal and 80 percent less sulfur.

</div>
<div></div>

Study: EPA is not to blame for decline in coal production

Cheap shale gas produced by fracking has driven the decline...

<div>
<div class="img-wrapper">Declining populations of pollinators is a major concern to ecologists because bees, butterflies and other insects play a critical role in supporting healthy ecosystems. Now a new study from urban ecologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests that when urban and suburban lawns are left untreated with herbicides, they provide a diversity of "spontaneous" flowers such as dandelions and clover that offer nectar and pollen to bees and other pollinators.</div>
Private lawns make up a significant part of urban lands in the United States, an estimated 50 percent of city and suburbs, say Susannah Lerman and co-author Joan Milam, an adjunct research fellow in environmental conservation. They write, "Practices that support nesting and foraging opportunities for bees could have important implications for bee conservation in suburban areas."

Lerman, an adjunct UMass Amherst faculty member who is also with the U.S. Forest Service, says, "We are still surprised at how many bees we found on these untreated lawns."

In this study of lawns in suburban Springfield, Mass., she and Milam found that "spontaneous lawn flowers could be viewed as supplemental floral resources and support pollinators, thereby enhancing the value of urban green spaces." Details appear in the current issue of Annals of the Entomological Society of America.

For this study, supported by the National Science Foundation, the researchers enlisted owners of 17 lawns in suburban Springfield. Between May 2013 and September 2014, the homeowners did not apply chemical pesticides or herbicides to lawns.

"We documented 63 plant species in the lawns, the majority of which were not intentionally planted," the authors report. Lerman and Milam visited each yard six times per year for two years, finding a total of 5,331 individual bees representing 111 species, of which 97 percent were native to North America.

Of particular interest was the discovery of a large population of Lasioglossum illinoense, a widespread sweat bee species and common in its range, but known in Massachusetts only from a single specimen collected in the late 1920s. The population of L. illinoense in Springfield lawns documents the northeastern range limit for this species.

Conserving native bees for their vital pollination services is of national interest, Lerman and Milam point out, and this new information on native bee distribution and abundance is important for making informed conservation and management decisions regarding pollinator conservation.

Overall, one of their main findings, say Lerman and Milam, is that "when lawns are not intensively managed, lawn flowers can serve as wildlife habitat and contribute to networks of urban green spaces."

Further, "developing outreach to homeowners and lawn care companies to encourage, rather than eliminate, lawn flowers such as dandelions and clover and thin grass cover or bare spots could be a key strategy for urban bee conservation programs targeting private yards."


</div>
<div></div>

Scientists: Help save the bees by keeping lawns natural

Declining populations of pollinators is a major concern to ecologists...

Hurricane Matthew maintains strength along Atlantic Coast. In its record-long week as a major hurricane, Matthew has threaded the needle with its track, staying over warm waters that provide fuel and avoiding land that could starve it. That's been a bit of good news for Florida, but if does actually hit land farther up the coast - and that's still a big question mark - that region would pay the price for Florida's good luck.
Here are some questions and answers about Hurricane Matthew:
---
Q: What does Matthew not quite hitting Florida mean for Georgia and the Carolinas?
A: It keeps the danger level higher, meteorologists say, because the close-but-not-quite-over-land track has kept Matthew's eye relatively strong. It's now been a week and counting as a major hurricane.
Matthew has found "one of the most ideal tracks that a hurricane can find to maintain that intensity," said University of Miami tropical meteorology researcher Brian McNoldy.
"It probably would be weaker if it would have gone over land in Florida instead of what it's doing," agreed senior scientist Christopher Davis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Q: How tight a needle has Matthew threaded?
A: Matthew is traveling up the Atlantic's warm Gulf Stream. A bit to the east, the water is cooler, providing weaker fuel. Just 10-to-30 miles westward is the coast, where the air is drier.
When a storm moves over land from warm water, it is like the ultimate severe diet: Eventually, it starves.
"This is a case that will probably save a lot of the coastal cities from pretty destructive wind, but the hurricane itself will maintain a lot of intensity," McNoldy says.
Just outside the eyewall, the wind speed has dropped dramatically; by noon Friday, no place on Florida had sustained winds that were hurricane force, even though Cape Canaveral had a gust of 107 mph, says former hurricane hunter meteorologist Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground.
That makes storm surge more of a problem than winds, at least in Florida, according to McNoldy and Masters.
---
Q: Why is Matthew hugging the coast, but not making landfall?
A: There's no scientific reason meteorologists know of. Hurricanes are guided by atmospheric currents, not ocean flows or the cut of the coastline.
"At this point it's just luck," McNoldy says. "There is no real reason why this whole curve is going the shape of the coastline. It could have gone 20 miles east, 20 miles west."
Even when Matthew passed between Haiti and Cuba, it mostly avoided land, especially mountains that could dramatically choke storms.
"It's quite strange actually," McNoldy says. "The atmosphere doesn't really know about the curvature of the coastline."
---
Q: How unusual for Matthew to stay strong so long?
A: It's not just unusual - it's a record, if you look at it in a certain way.
At more than a week of major hurricane strength, with sustained winds over 110 mph, Matthew beat the old record of six days for storms after Sept. 25, according Phil Klotzbach, meteorology professor at Colorado State University. Klotzbach uses this date - after start of fall - because atmospheric and water conditions are quite different in the later part of hurricane season, making it harder for storms to stay strong.
Matthew has been moving over water several degrees warmer than average, on a track relatively free of higher, weakening winds. These conditions, especially the winds, are likely to change.
---
Q: So will the U.S. continue its "drought" of major hurricane landfalls?
A: It's been nearly 11 years since 2005's Hurricane Wilma, since a major hurricane made landfall in the United States, a record long time. Meteorologists had been thinking Matthew would end it, but now they say there's a good possibility the drought will continue.
South Carolina still has a decent chance of being hit directly, but even then, Matthew could weaken just a bit and slip below major hurricane status, Masters says.
The nearly 11 year drought is an artificial construct, just random chance, Masters says. For example, Superstorm Sandy struck during that time and was devastating, but technically wasn't a major hurricane in terms of wind speed, even if it was major for destruction. And in 2008, Hurricane Ike missed being a major hurricane at landfall by just 5 mph, so if definitions had been slightly different, no one would be talking drought, Masters says.
---
Q: Has anything good come out of Matthew's hugging <a href="https://www.bing.com/search?q=florida&amp;cvid=519823df7dbe481f9c65f735e2dbf1cb&amp;FORM=ANAB01&amp;PC=HCTS">Florida</a>?
A: Most likely yes, says Davis. The National <a href="http://www.earth.com/endangered-species/megalagrion-oceanicum/">Oceanic</a> and Atmospheric Administration planes fly out of western Florida and the proximity has enabled them to make many research trips.
Plus, the storm has been close enough to NOAA radar to provide scientists with good inside-the-action data, Davis says.
"In a sense you can look at this as being a benefit in some ways to hurricane research," Davis says. "A silver lining perhaps."
© 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Hurricane Matthew maintains strength along Atlantic Coast

Hurricane Matthew maintains strength along Atlantic Coast. In its record-long...

<div class="img-wrapper">Honey bee colonies in the United States have been dying at high rates for over a decade, and agricultural pesticides--including fungicides, herbicides and insecticides--are often implicated as major culprits. Until now, most scientific studies have looked at pesticides one at a time, rather than investigating the effects of multiple real-world pesticide exposures within a colony.</div>
A new study is the first to systematically assess multiple pesticides that accumulate within bee colonies. The researchers found that the number of different pesticides within a colony--regardless of dose--closely correlates with colony death. The results also suggest that some fungicides, often regarded as safe for bees, correlate with high rates of colony deaths. The study appeared online September 15, 2016, in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

"Our results fly in the face of one of the basic tenets of toxicology: that the dose makes the poison," said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an assistant professor of entomology at UMD and senior author on the study. "We found that the number of different compounds was highly predictive of colony death, which suggests that the addition of more compounds somehow overwhelms the bees' ability to detoxify themselves."

The researchers followed 91 honey bee colonies, owned by three different migratory commercial beekeepers, for an entire agricultural season. The colonies began their journey in Florida and moved up the East Coast, providing pollination services for different crops along the way. They also spent time in locations meant for honey production, as well as "holding areas" where beekeepers prepare large numbers of colonies for upcoming pollination contracts.

A total of 93 different pesticide compounds found their way into the colonies over the course of the season, accumulating in the wax, in processed pollen known as bee bread and in the bodies of nurse bees. At every stop along the beekeepers' itinerary, the researchers assessed three different parameters within each colony: the total number of pesticides; the total number of "relevant" pesticides (defined as those above a minimum threshold of toxicity); and each colony's "hazard quotient," a measure devised by other researchers to integrate the total hazard posed to each colony by the cumulative toxicity of all pesticides present.

All three measures correlated with a higher probability of colony death or queen failure. In addition, the researchers found between five and 20 different pesticide residues in every sample of bee bread that exceeded a hazard quotient's safety threshold. The highest number of pesticides accumulated in the colonies early on, shortly after beekeepers placed colonies into early season flowering crops like apples and blueberries. Honey production stopovers and holding areas offered the bees some respite from further contamination.

The study results also suggest that some fungicides, which have led to the mortality of honey bee larvae in lab studies, could have toxic effects on colony survival in the field. In the current study, pesticides with a particular mode of action also corresponded to higher colony mortality. For example, the fungicides most closely linked to queen deaths and colony mortality disrupted sterols--compounds that are essential for fungal development and survival.

"We were surprised to find such an abundance of fungicides inside the hives, but it was even more surprising to find that fungicides are linked to imminent colony mortality," said Kirsten Traynor, a postdoctoral researcher in entomology at UMD and lead author on the study. "These compounds have long been thought to be safe for bees. We're seeing them at higher doses than the chemicals beekeepers apply directly to the colonies to control varroa mites. So that is particularly concerning."

The current study borrows a concept from human cancer research: the "exposome," or the sum total of chemicals an organism is exposed to over its lifetime. But instead of looking at individual bees, the researchers assessed each colony as a single "superorganism" that functions as a single, cohesive unit.

Within this framework, the researchers tracked the death of queen bees, which is a life-threatening event for the colony as a whole. In some cases, a colony is able to create a new queen, but if those efforts fail the entire colony will die. In the current study, colonies with very low pesticide contamination in the wax experienced no queen events, while all colonies with high pesticide contamination in the wax lost a queen during the beekeeping season.

"This is a huge problem for beekeepers currently. Not long ago, a queen would typically last up to two years. But now many commercial beekeepers replace the queens in at least half of their colonies every spring in the hopes that this will prevent premature queen deaths," Traynor explained. "Even with such measures, many queens still don't make it through one season."

The research team did not find a significant contribution from neonicotinoid pesticides. These compounds, derived from nicotine, are currently some of the most common pesticides in use globally. Because of their ubiquitous use, neonicotinoids have received significant media attention for their potential role in honey bee declines.

"We just did not find neonicotinoids in the colonies," vanEngelsdorp explained. "There were some trace residues of neonicotinoids in a few samples, but not nearly on par with other compounds. However, it's possible we did not test the right matrix--we did not test nectar, for example--or that the product breaks down faster than others in the collection process or that neonicotinoids are simply not very prevalent when crops are flowering."

Because industrial practices have changed since the researchers collected the data for this study, Traynor and vanEngelsdorp acknowledge that further research could reveal new patterns in the relationship between pesticides and honey bee health. But the current study nonetheless offers some important insights for beekeepers and farmers alike.

"We have to figure out ways to reduce the amount of products that bees are exposed to while still helping farmers produce their crops," vanEngelsdorp said. "This will require careful examination of spray plans, to make sure we only use the products we need, when we need them, in order to reduce the number of products bees are exposed to while pollinating different crops."
###
In addition to Traynor and vanEngelsdorp, study co-authors include Jeffery Pettis (U.S. Department of Agriculture), David Tarpy (North Carolina State University), and Christopher Mullin, James Frazier and Maryann Frazier (Pennsylvania State University).

The research paper, "In-hive Pesticide Exposome: Assessing risks to migratory honey bees from in-hive pesticide contamination in the Eastern United States," Kirsten Traynor, Jeffery Pettis, David Tarpy, Christopher Mullin, James Frazier, Maryann Frazier and Dennis vanEngelsdorp, was published in the online journal Nature Scientific Reports on September 15, 2016.

&nbsp;

Multiple pesticides linked to death of honey bee colonies

Honey bee colonies in the United States have been dying...

<div>
<div class="img-wrapper">As Hurricane Matthew continues to crawl along the southeastern U.S. coast NASA observed the storm's winds, clouds, precipitation and more. Matthew remained a major hurricane on Friday, Oct. 7 at 2 p.m. EDT.</div>
On Oct. 6, NASA's CloudSat passed over the eastern quadrant of Hurricane Matthew at 2:30 p.m. EDT. CloudSat revealed the anvil (thick cirrus cloud cover) with cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds beneath the cirrus. CloudSat found areas of higher reflectivity that included larger water and/or ice droplets throughout the clouds.

The next day, NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite observatory captured data on Matthew's winds. SMAP observations of hurricane Matthew showed winds up to 132 mph (59 meters per second/212 kph) at 7:52 a.m. EDT (11:52 UTC) on Oct. 7. "SMAP has excellent sensitivity to extreme winds, far beyond that from typical scatterometers," said Alexander Fore, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "SMAP is sensitive to these extreme winds due to the use of the L-band passive brightness temperature observation, which has the additional benefit of not being attenuated by rain giving accurate wind speeds regardless of rain conditions."

SMAP will map global soil moisture and detect whether soils are frozen or thawed. The mission will help scientists understand the links between Earth's water, energy and carbon cycles; help reduce uncertainties in predicting weather and climate; and enhance our ability to monitor and predict natural hazards such as floods and droughts.

At 2:30 p.m. EDT a visible image from NOAA's GOES-East satellite showed Matthew's clouds engulfing almost all of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. The image was created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

At that time a Hurricane Warning was in effect for Cocoa Beach to Surf City. A Hurricane Watch is in effect from north of Surf City to Cape Lookout, North Carolina. A Tropical Storm Warning was in effect from Florida's Sebastian Inlet to Cocoa Beach, and north of Surf City to Duck, North Carolina, and the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds, North Carolina.

At 2 p.m. EDT (1800 UTC) on Oct. 7, Matthew remained a Category 3 Hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The eye of Hurricane Matthew was located near latitude 29.7 North, longitude 80.7 West. That's about 40 miles (60 km) east-southeast of St. Augustine, Florida.

NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Matthew is moving toward the north-northwest near 13 mph (20 km/h), and this general motion is expected to continue today. A turn toward the north is expected tonight or Saturday, Oct. 8. On the forecast track, the center of Matthew will continue to move near or over the coast of northeast Florida and Georgia through tonight, and near or over the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.

Maximum sustained winds are near 115 mph (185 kph) with higher gusts. Matthew is a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Although weakening is forecast during the next 48 hours, Matthew is expected to remain a hurricane until it begins to move away from the United States on Sunday.

Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 60 miles (95 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 185 miles (295 km). The latest minimum central pressure reported by an Air Force Hurricane Hunter plane was 947 millibars.

A wind gust to 84 mph (135 kph) was recently reported at Ponte Vedra, and a coastal marine observing station at St. Augustine recently measured a wind gust of 85 mph (137 kph). A tidal gauge at Fernandina Beach, Florida reported a storm surge inundation of 3.11 feet above mean higher high water.

For updated forecasts, please visit the National Hurricane Center website: <a href="http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://www.nhc.noaa.gov</a>.


</div>
<div></div>

Hurricane Matthew continues to crawl along the Florida coast

As Hurricane Matthew continues to crawl along the southeastern U.S....

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Today’s Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.esa.int/">European Space Agency</a> features Nushagak Bay, a large estuary in southwest Alaska. Nushagak runs mainly north to south and exits in Bristol Bay, a large body of water in the Bering Sea.



"The bay is primarily fed by the Nushagak River, which begins in the Alaska Range and flows southwest approximately 450 km. The bay is also fed by several additional rivers including the Wood, Igushik, Snake and Weary rivers," says ESA.



"The dark colors of the Nushagak River are most likely due to tannins or lignins (chemical substances found in plants). Tannins and lignins from roots, leaves, seeds, bark and soil can leach into the water and give it a brown or even black colour. The sediments then flow southwards where it is mixed with the bluer waters of the bay."



Video/ Image Credit: ESA



---



By <a href="http://csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Staff Writer

Nushagak Bay in southwest Alaska

[sendtonews key="0ynNMYkMKa-2340414-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from the...

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Today's Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.acs.org/">American Chemical Society</a> (ACS) reveals that proteins on flu viruses are actually flexible, tilting and waving in a “breath-like” motion. According to the experts, these proteins could be used to better defend against the flu.



"The main antigenic targets of influenza virus are two surface glycoproteins, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA). Whereas the structural and dynamical properties of both glycoproteins have been studied previously, the understanding of their plasticity in the whole-virion context is fragmented," wrote the researchers.



To investigate, the team conducted detailed simulations of the influenza A H1N1 virion, or the swine flu. The experts concluded that the visualizations show many new vulnerable states of flu viruses, which could improve future vaccines and antiviral drugs.



Video/ Image Credit: American Chemical Society&nbsp;



---



By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



Check us out on <a href="https://www.earth.com/earthsnap/">EarthSnap</a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

Flu viruses are more flexible than expected

[sendtonews key="G9bUoxcjr4-2511624-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from the...

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Today’s Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.esa.int/">European Space Agency</a> features Lake Trasimeno, which is located west of Perugia in central Italy. It is the fourth largest lake in the country. While Trasimeno’s water level varies, it has a maximum depth of approximately six meters.&nbsp;



"In this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image, captured on 6 August 2022, the lake’s emerald green colour is likely due to the presence of phytoplankton. Streaks in the water, particularly visible in the west, indicate the presence of soil and sediments which have been stirred up by winds. Dark colored waters in the southern part of the lake indicate a presence of submerged and floating macrophytes (aquatic plants) as well as algae," says ESA.



"Surrounded by hills on three sides, Trasimeno is subject to heavy storms created by winds, especially from the north and west. There are three islets in the lake: Maggiore, Minore and Polvese (the largest). The lake’s shores are sparsely inhabited with only two popular villages: Castiglione del Lago and Passignano sul Trasimeno."



"Italy is experiencing its worst drought in 70 years which has affected drinking water supplies, hydroelectric power and agricultural production. High temperatures, hot winds and lack of rainfall are the main causes of drought in the Umbrian region which saw Lake Trasimeno’s drop 1.3 m, reaching the limit of the hydrometric zero in July 2022."



Video/Image Credit: ESA&nbsp;



---



By <a href="http://csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Staff Writer

Lake Trasimeno in Central Italy

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Today's Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.acs.org/">American Chemical Society</a> describes a new self-powered nanosensor that can instantly detect mercury contamination with the tap of a finger.&nbsp;



The oxidized form of mercury can be harmful when it is ingested through contaminated water or food. This makes it necessary for experts to develop sensors that can quickly and accurately detect the presence of mercury.&nbsp;



Zong-Hong Lin and colleagues have now created a triboelectric nanosensor (TENS) that can detect mercury by simply by touching a sample. According to the researchers, their TENS could serve as the basis for similar devices to safely and remotely monitor other pollutants.



Video Credit: American Chemical Society&nbsp;



---



By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



Check us out on <a href="https://www.earth.com/earthsnap/">EarthSnap</a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

Detecting mercury contamination with the tap of a finger

[sendtonews key="LvS8v8bp9z-2564889-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from the...

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Today’s Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.esa.int/">European Space Agency</a> features Kainji Lake, a reservoir on the Niger River.



In 1968, Kainji Lake was created by the construction of the Kainji Dam. The Niger River, the third longest in Africa, enters the lake in the north.&nbsp;



According to <a href="https://www.earth.com/news/rivers-in-the-american-west-are-a-lifesaving-resource-for-birds/">ESA</a>, the creation of the lake submerged Foge Island and the town of Bussa and permanently flooded other riverine settlements, leaving around 50,000 people displaced.&nbsp;



Large parts of Foge Island are temporarily exposed during low water tides, and the land is often used by migrating fishermen. Kainji Dam is a dam across the Niger River in Niger State of Central Nigeria. 



Wild mammals occur at relatively low densities due to illegal hunting. Lake Kainji has suffered a dramatic decline as a fishery due to the high numbers of artisanal and subsistence fisherfolk using the lake. It has been suggested that a period of closure, together with controlled fishing rights may help improve fish stocks.



Kainji Lake National Park is the oldest of its kind in Nigeria. The park contains three distinct areas: a part of the Kainji Lake, the Borgu Game Reserve to the west of the lake, and the Zugurma Game Reserve to the southeast. The park is home to around 65 mammal species, 350 bird species, and 30 species of reptiles and amphibians. 



Video/ Image Credit: European Space Agency&nbsp;



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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Kainji Lake in north central Nigeria

[sendtonews key="iuA5mpp3jv-1641775-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from the...

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Today’s Video of the Day from <a href="https://www.igb.illinois.edu/">Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology</a> reveals how scientists can modify common crops like soybean, rice, and wheat to protect them from heat stress.



“We need to double crop production by 2050 to feed a growing global population, and not only are we not on track to do that, but climate change is further complicating things,” said Amanda Cavanagh, a lecturer at the University of Essex. 



The study is part of Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), an international research project that aims to develop food crops that turn the sun’s energy into food more efficiently.



“Using an engineering approach we designed multiple alternative metabolic pathways to photorespiration. Testing them in the field showed increases in productivity which led Amanda to significantly move the project forward by showing our engineered plants can withstand pretty extreme temperature stress,” said study co-author and RIPE researcher Paul South.&nbsp;



“As the climate changes and temperature stresses increase the pressure on our global food supply, farmers will need every tool available including engineering approaches like the synthetic biology used here to maintain safe and productive harvests.”



The experts tested plants modified to have more efficient photorespiration to see if they were better adapted to warmer temperatures.&nbsp;



The team found that the engineered plants produced 26 percent more biomass than the wild-type plants exposed to the same temperatures, and had 15 percent less yield loss under the higher temperatures.



Video Credit: Amanda Nguyen/University of Illinois



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



Check us out on <a href="https://www.earth.com/earthsnap/">EarthSnap</a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

Designing crops that can beat the heat

[sendtonews key="QGPzYnXEtN-1712599-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from Carl...

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Today’s Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.acs.org/">American Chemical Society</a> explores the ability of salt to transform the way that foods and beverages taste. Salt is known to cover up undesirable flavors, such as bitterness in coffee or beer, but how exactly does sodium chloride change the taste of other compounds?



One previous study showed that, not only does salt suppress bitterness, but also enhances sweetness and sourness. Another study revealed that bitterness reduction by salt seems to be happening at the tongue receptor level as well as in the brain.&nbsp;



While it is known that salt taste is mediated by the presence of sodium channels in the form of taste buds, experts believe that there is also an unknown receptor responsible for how we taste salt that has not yet been identified.&nbsp;



Video Credit: ACS Reactions



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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How does salt makes things taste better?

[sendtonews key="X0f6OHYoI4-2310561-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from the...

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Today’s Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.esa.int/">European Space Agency</a> features Santiago, the capital city of Chile. The city is located in the center of the Santiago Metropolitan Region, which has a population of about eight million people.&nbsp;



'The weather of Santiago resembles the Mediterranean climate with dry and warm summers with temperatures reaching up to 35°C (from October to March) and cool and humid winters that can drop to 0°C (from April to September)."



"The city lies in the centre of the country’s central valley around 80 km from the Pacific Ocean to the west and borders Argentina to the east. A tiny part of Argentina is visible in the top-right corner of the image where the mountain crest of the Andes Mountains acts as a divider between the two countries," says ESA.



Video/ Image Credit: ESA



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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Santiago, Chile in South America

[sendtonews key="JRaP49ISmm-2357509-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from the...

Spiral,Galaxy,,Illustration,Of,Milky,Way

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Astronomers at <a href="https://www.jhu.edu/">Johns Hopkins University</a> have created an interactive map of the universe, including the actual position and real colors of 200,000 galaxies. The map allows the public to access data that was previously only available to scientists.



The map was developed using data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. For over two decades, a telescope in New Mexico was aimed at slightly different locations to capture the night sky.&nbsp;



"Growing up I was very inspired by astronomy pictures, stars, nebulae and galaxies, and now it's our time to create a new type of picture to inspire people," said map creator Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins. "Astrophysicists around the world have been analyzing this data for years, leading to thousands of scientific papers and discoveries. But nobody took the time to create a map that is beautiful, scientifically accurate, and accessible to people who are not scientists. Our goal here is to show everybody what the universe really looks like."



"In this map, we are just a speck at the very bottom, just one pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets. We are used to seeing astronomical pictures showing one galaxy here, one galaxy there or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale."



"From this speck at the bottom, we are able to map out galaxies across the entire universe, and that says something about the power of science."



The <a href="https://mapoftheuniverse.net/">interactive map</a> is available online, where it can be downloaded for free.



Video Credit: Johns Hopkins&nbsp;



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



Check us out on <a href="https://www.earth.com/earthsnap/">EarthSnap</a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

Interactive map of the universe includes 200,000 galaxies

[sendtonews key="e4ZG0Jawp3-2374785-12187" type="single"] Astronomers at Johns Hopkins University have created...

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Today's Video of the Day from <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/goddard">NASA Goddard</a> describes the first comprehensive estimate of carbon density in the Saharan, Sahel, and Sudanian zones of Africa. In an effort to measure the amount of carbon stored across these drylands, a team of scientists used high-resolution satellite images and artificial intelligence to map nearly 10 billion individual trees. 



"The high spatial resolution (50 cm) combined with AI and field measurements used in this study is key to improving tree inventories in drylands," said Pierre Hiernaux, a French researcher working for NASA. "The ever-increasing availability of very high-resolution satellite imagery will make it possible to assess carbon pools and their dynamics at the individual tree level on a global scale."



"This study is exceptional because it is pioneering a type of approach that will revolutionize the monitoring of trees and forests on a global scale: in the short term, it will be possible to map the world's trees from the centre of the Amazon to our schoolyards," said <a href="https://www.inrae.fr/en">INRAE</a> researcher Jean-Pierre Wigneron.



"Many fields of application will become much more efficient and accurate, such as tracking carbon stocks, biodiversity, monitoring logging and protection against illegal forest degradation, in near real time.”



Video Credit: NASA Goddard&nbsp;



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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Remote sensing will revolutionize the way we monitor trees

[sendtonews key="EjmSP20gQK-2593093-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from NASA...

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Today's Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.esa.int/">European Space Agency</a> features Dublin, the capital and largest city of Ireland. Beyond its pub culture, Dublin is known as a modern culinary destination and a UNESCO City of Literature.



"Dublin is located near the midpoint of Ireland’s east coast in the province of Leinster. The city, which covers an area of around 115 square kilometers, is bordered by the Dublin Mountains, a low mountain range to the south, and is surrounded by flat farmland to the north and west," says ESA.



"The city straddles the River Liffey, which rises in the Wicklow Mountains and flows around 80 kilometers eastwards through the city of Dublin, in which it is canalised and bordered with quays. It then empties into Dublin Bay, an arm of the Irish Sea."



Dublin has an abundance of green spaces, including one of the largest enclosed public parks in any European capital city. Phoenix Park, which was originally formed as a royal hunting park in the 1660s, includes 707 hectares of green space.



Video Credit: ESA&nbsp;



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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The city of Dublin on Ireland's east coast

[sendtonews key="qjvhBOBnY8-2426650-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from the...

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Today's Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.esa.int/">European Space Agency</a> features the province of Zaragoza in northeast Spain. The image was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.



"Together with the provinces of Huesca and Teruel, Zaragoza formed the old kingdom of Aragon. Its capital, also called Zaragoza (not visible in this image) is home to around half of Aragon’s population," says ESA.



"The Ebro River can be seen winding its way through the province from west to east in this image. Between its source in the Cantabrian Mountains in the northwest and its delta on the Mediterranean coast, the Ebro River is fed by more than 200 tributaries as it flows 910 km across much of northern Spain."



Since rainfall is very scarce in this region, irrigation in the Ebro basin is critically important. In the valleys surrounding the Ebro River, many fields are used for growing crops such as corn, wheat, and barley.



Video/ Image Credit: ESA



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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The province of Zaragoza in northeast Spain

[sendtonews key="oL4FnPTGCV-2384527-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from the...

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Today's Video of the Day from <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/goddard">NASA Goddard</a> features a visual dataset of.methane emissions from wetlands across the globe. Atmospheric methane levels have reached record highs in recent years, and wetlands are a major source of these emissions.&nbsp;



"Methane is an important greenhouse gas that contributes substantially to global warming. On a molecule by molecule basis, methane is much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, the main driver of warming," says NASA.



"Though human activities, including agriculture, oil and natural gas production and use, and waste disposal, collectively contribute the majority of methane to the atmosphere, about a third of total methane emissions comes from wetlands."&nbsp;



According to NASA, understanding methane emissions from wetlands and other natural sources is critically important for scientists and policymakers who are working to combat climate change by reducing emissions from human activities.



Video Credit: NASA Goddard



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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Wetlands are a major source of methane emissions

[sendtonews key="f8fukm28Vz-2491833-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from NASA...

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Today’s Video of the Day from <a href="https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/">NASA Earth Observatory</a> reveals the evolution of the Columbia Glacier in southeastern Alaska. Columbia is among the fastest shrinking glaciers in the world, and the video documents its rapid retreat over the years.&nbsp;



Columbia Glacier is a large, multi-branched calving glacier that flows out of the Chugach Mountains to the Prince William Sound.&nbsp;



According to USGS, Columbia had a long history of stability prior to 1980, with a length 41 miles, and small, short-lived advances or retreats.



In the years since 1980, however, satellite images have captured Columbia’s alarming retreat. By using false-color images, scientists can distinguish between snow and ice, open water, vegetation, and rocky debris on the glacier’s surface.



The series of false-color images featured in today's video were acquired over the span of 35 years. You can see that by 2021, the glacier’s main branch had retreated about 15 miles from its initial position.



The Columbia Glacier has also lost more than 50 percent of its volume, mostly due to calving. <a href="https://www.earth.com/video/nasa-reveals-3d-visual-of-an-atmospheric-river/">NASA</a> reports that while climate change likely started the retreat, mechanical processes kept the disintegration going.



The NASA images are provided by Jesse Allen, Robert Simmon, Joshua Stevens, and Lauren Dauphin using data from Landsat satellites, from the U.S. Geological Survey, and data from MODIS on NASA’s Terra satellite. The structure of Columbia’s moraine played a large role in the stability of the glacier before 1980. 



Like other tidewater glaciers, the Columbia built up a moraine over time, and the mixture of ice and rock functioned like a dam keeping out the sea. It was supported on one end by the shoreline and by the underwater terminal moraine at the other.



Video Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/&nbsp; NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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The rapid retreat of the Columbia Glacier

[sendtonews key="0879czfG3k-1785905-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from NASA...

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Today’s Video of the Day from the <a href="https://www.esa.int/">European Space Agency</a> features the Pyrenees Mountains, which form a natural boundary between France and Spain in southwest Europe.



The mountain range is 430 kilometers in length. It stretches from the Mediterranean Sea on the east to the Atlantic Ocean on the west.



At an elevation of 3404 meters, Pico de Aneto is the highest mountain peak in the Pyrenees, and the third-highest peak in Spain. Pico de Aneto is located in the Posets-Maladeta Natural Park, which spans more than 82,000 acres.&nbsp;



"Geological studies have revealed that the Pyrenees Mountains have been around for longer than the Alps, with their sediments first deposited in coastal basins during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras," reports ESA.



"The entire mountain range formed due to the upwelling of large sedimentary rocks by the collision of the Iberian and the Eurasian plate around 100 to 150 million years ago, followed by intense erosion from ice and water."



The western Pyrenees receive more precipitation due to moisture blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. The mountain range contains many lakes, several small glaciers, and some of the highest waterfalls in Europe.



Video &amp; Image Credit: ESA



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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The Pyrenees Mountains in southwest Europe

[sendtonews key="6HyfrAJTBI-1831843-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from the...

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Today’s Video of the Day from <a href="https://www.stowers.org/">Stowers Institute for Medical Research</a> describes why experts are studying zebrafish to gain a better understanding of how the immune system responds to injury. Zebrafish have the ability to repair and regenerate organs.



“Organ regeneration offers an exciting opportunity for studying the immune system and to inquire why some species can regenerate organs like the heart or missing limbs while others like humans cannot,” explained Dr. Tatjana Piotrowski.



Zebrafish sensory organ hair cells are an ideal system to investigate the pathways and cell types involved in regeneration since they are easily destroyed with antibiotics and begin regenerating within five hours. This enabled the researchers to identify the exact timing and genetic programs for each anti-inflammatory macrophage activation state.&nbsp;



“Our hypothesis is that human macrophages do not receive the proper chemical activation 'cocktail' to instruct pro-regenerative processes,” said Dr. Nicolas Denans. “Identifying the molecular recipe of macrophage activation in zebrafish may one day enable us to design regenerative immunotherapies in humans.”&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



“The new evidence is a valuable resource for comparative studies on the genetic programs involved in macrophage-mediated repair and regeneration. In other words, different types of injuries may induce different kinds of inflammatory responses. We want to decipher whether this 'language' is universal or if there are a variety of dialects."



Video Credit: Stowers Institute for Medical Research&nbsp;



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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How the immune system responds to injury

[sendtonews key="0dEcERCq61-2283382-12187" type="single"] Today’s Video of the Day from Stowers...

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Today's Video of the Day from <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/goddard">NASA Goddard</a> describes how record-breaking heat expressed itself around the world in 2022.



Scientists have determined that 2022 was the 5th warmest year since 1880. Furthermore, the last nine consecutive years have been the warmest on record.



From devastating floods and wildfires to natural disasters like Hurricane Ian, 2022 showed us yet again how a warming climate affects people across the globe.&nbsp;



"As we look back at 20:22 and years past, we see that each year we better understand the challenges we face and how important it is to meet them," says NASA.



Video/ Image Credit: NASA Goddard



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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2022 illustrated the consequences of a warming climate

[sendtonews key="3UUsNkFOuS-2487333-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from NASA...

Earth,Like,Exoplanet,3d,Render

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Today's Video of the Day from <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/goddard">NASA Goddard</a> describes two exoplanets that are orbiting a star 218 light-years away. A team of researchers led by the University of Montreal has found evidence that these planets are "water worlds."



The experts used data from NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. They discovered that exoplanets Kepler-138 c and Kepler-138 could be composed largely of water.



"We previously thought that planets that were a bit larger than Earth were big balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up versions of Earth, and that's why we called them super-Earths," explained study co-author Björn Benneke.&nbsp;



"However, we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138 c and d, are quite different in nature and that a big fraction of their entire volume is likely composed of water. It is the best evidence yet for water worlds, a type of planet that was theorized by astronomers to exist for a long time."



Video Credit: NASA Goddard



Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and Leah Hustak (STScI)



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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Two distant planets may be "water worlds"

[sendtonews key="QIoVYJqRBi-2434608-12187" type="single"] Today's Video of the Day from NASA...

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Satellites reveal how Earth's systems are interconnected Today’s Video of the Day from <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/goddard">NASA Goddard</a> describes Earth’s interconnected systems, and how this network is affected by rising temperatures.&nbsp;



During 2020, average global temperatures matched the hottest year on record. The hurricane season was also record-breaking, with many of the storms intensifying at extraordinary speeds. Hot water in the ocean is fuel for hurricanes. The satellite data shows that it's all one interconnected system showing how Satellites reveal how Earth's systems are interconnected.



According to NASA, dust swept up from Northern Africa plays a major role in the formation of hurricanes, and is also a key source of fertilization in the Amazon rainforest. As a result of<a href="https://www.earth.com/news/seagrass-wasting-disease-is-fueled-by-climate-change/"> climate</a> change, dust plumes are expected to decline, which will have an effect on vegetation far away.&nbsp;



Images from Earth-observing satellites show how the world’s plant life is affected by natural disasters, fires, and deforestation. Satellites also reveal how widespread changes in vegetation impact waterways,&nbsp; the climate, air quality. Satellites communicate by using radio waves to send signals to the antennas on the Earth. "Earth From Space" is a groundbreaking two-hour special that reveals a spectacular new space-based vision of our planet. 



Video Credit: NASA Goddard&nbsp;



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By <a href="mailto:csexton@earth.com">Chrissy Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.earth.com/staff/">Earth.com</a> Editor



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Satellites reveal how Earth's systems are interconnected

[sendtonews key="JbW4VsY53O-1632195-12187" type="single"] Satellites reveal how Earth's systems are interconnected...

Today’s Video of the Day from the <a href="https://welcome.miami.edu/">University of Miami</a> Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science explores how changes in water temperatures have affected tiger shark habitats and movements in the North Atlantic Ocean. The study reveals that rising temperatures have caused the sharks to shift toward the poles over the past 40 years.



“Tiger shark annual migrations have expanded poleward, paralleling rising water temperatures,” explained study lead author Neil Hammerschlag. “These results have consequences for tiger shark conservation, since shifts in their movements outside of marine protected areas may leave them more vulnerable to commercial fishing.”



The researchers analyzed nine years of tracking data from satellite-tagged tiger sharks, combined with four decades of conventional tag and recapture data provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cooperative Shark Tagging Program.



The experts found that during the last decade of record heat, for every one-degree Celsius increase in water temperatures, tiger sharks migrated further poleward by over 400 kilometers. They also migrated two weeks earlier than usual to waters off the northeastern coast of the United States.



“Given their role as apex predators, these changes to tiger shark movements may alter predator-prey interactions, leading to ecological imbalances, and more frequent encounters with humans,” concluded Professor Hammerschlag.



Video Credit: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science



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Tiger sharks are shifting poleward as temperatures rise

Today’s Video of the Day from the University of Miami...