Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”
A world-first global analysis of marine responses to climbing human CO2 emissions has painted a grim picture of future fisheries and ocean ecosystems. Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marine ecologists from the University of Adelaide say the expected ocean acidification and warming is likely to produce a reduction in diversity and numbers of …
Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world’s seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut. The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, …
Whooping cough has made an astonishing comeback, with 2012 seeing nearly 50,000 infections in the U.S. (the most since 1955), and a death rate in infants three times that of the rest of the population. The dramatic resurgence has puzzled public health officials, who have pointed to the waning effectiveness of the current vaccine and growing anti-vaccine sentiment as the …
In states with strong environmental movements, greenhouse gas emissions are inching lower. Social scientist Thomas Dietz and Kenneth Frank, professor of sociometrics at Michigan State University, have teamed up to find a way to tell if a state jumping on the environmental bandwagon can mitigate other human factors—such as population growth and economic affluence—that are known to hurt the environment. …
The environmental movement is making a difference – nudging greenhouse gas emissions down in states with strong green voices, according to a Michigan State University (MSU) study. Social scientist Thomas Dietz and Kenneth Frank, MSU Foundation professor of sociometrics, have teamed up to find a way to tell if a state jumping on the environmental bandwagon can mitigate other human …
With infectious diseases increasing worldwide, the need to understand how and why disease outbreaks occur is becoming increasingly important. Looking for answers, a team of University of South Florida (USF) biologists and colleagues found broad evidence that supports the controversial ‘dilution effect hypothesis,’ which suggests that biodiversity limits outbreaks of disease among humans and wildlife. The paper describing their research …
A recent peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed what many fracking critics have argued for years: drilling operations associated with hydraulic fracturing (“fracking) for oil and gas can contaminate groundwater. For the study, researchers examined groundwater contamination incidents at three homes in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale basin in Bradford County. As The New York Times explained, the water samples showed …
Study after study shows that Antarctica isn’t in great shape. Its ice shelves are disappearing and its ice sheets are collapsing, hastening swiftly rising sea levels. Sounds terrible. But just in case you wanted a second opinion, a new study out of Princeton University takes a look at a decade’s worth of satellite data. Their results, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, show that not only …
During the past decade, Antarctica’s massive ice sheet lost twice the amount of ice in its western portion compared with what it accumulated in the east, according to Princeton University researchers who came to one overall conclusion — the southern continent’s ice cap is melting ever faster. The researchers “weighed” Antarctica’s ice sheet using gravitational satellite data and found that …
Phytoplankton, commonly known as plant plankton that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, are potentially a key driver of Arctic warming under greenhouse warming, a study reveals. Scientists with Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), and Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST), presented on Monday, April 20, in Proceedings of …
