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Louisiana State University paleoclimatologist Kristine DeLong contributed to an international research breakthrough that sheds new light on how the tilt of the Earth affects the world’s heaviest rainbelt. DeLong analyzed data from the past 282,000 years that shows, for the first time, a connection between the Earth’s tilt called obliquity that shifts every 41,000 years, and the movement of a low pressure band of clouds that is the Earth’s largest source of heat and moisture—the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ.

As the use of soilless, hydroponic growing methods becomes more prevalent among crop producers, researchers are looking for new materials that can help growers save money, produce healthy plants, and contribute to sustainable practices. The authors of a study in the October 2015 issue of HortScience say that biochar, a charcoal-like material produced by heating biomass in the absence of oxygen, can help “close the loop” when used as a substrate for soilless, hydroponic tomato production.

(Phys.org)—Two separate teams of researchers (one from Mexico, the other Sweden), have incited skepticism among the astronomy community by posting papers on the preprint server arXiv each describing a different large object they observed in the outer edges of the solar system. Both teams made their observations after reviewing data from ALMA—a cluster of radio dishes in the Chilean mountains.

Many science researchers struggle with translating their research findings to legislative policies and health practices, causing the majority of new findings to remain largely inside the scientific community. With more than 300 million monthly users, Twitter’s success has piqued the interests of many science researchers as a possible tool to publicize new research findings

As microRNA biology has been implicated in everything from the development of cancer to virus infections, a new tool developed by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai holds tremendous potential to develop new therapies that involve these small regulatory fragments of RNA. The scientists’ findings are detailed in a study, titled “MicroRNA Function is Limited to Cytokine Control in the Acute Response to Virus Infection,” published in the December issue of Cell Host & Microbe

New research findings are yielding insights into the physics behind the swimming behavior of bacteria and spermatozoa that could lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms affecting fertility and formation of bacterial biofilms that foul everything from implantable medical devices to industrial pipes.

The earth is facing a catastrophic species extinction crisis. The dominant approach to conservation has been to focus on protecting pristine environments, but new research from Australia demonstrates that on average, urban environments contain disproportionately more threatened protected species in a given area than non-urban environments.

While most of the knowledge about tiny snails comes from studying empty shells sifted out from piles of dust and sand, the present research is the first contemporary microscopic exploration of organs in cave snails tinier than 2 mm. The paper, published in the open-access journal Subterranean Biology, reveals that underneath the seemingly fragile shells of the Zospeum genus, there are strikingly huge organs.

Most people think of black holes as giant vacuum cleaners sucking in everything that gets too close. But the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are more like cosmic engines, converting energy from infalling matter into intense radiation that can outshine the combined light from all surrounding stars