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Beneath the barren whiteness of Greenland, a mysterious world has popped into view. Using ice-penetrating radar, researchers have discovered ragged blocks of ice as tall as city skyscrapers and as wide as the island of Manhattan at the very bottom of the ice sheet, apparently formed as water beneath the ice refreezes and warps the surrounding ice upwards.

May 2014 was the third warmest May in the 35-year satellite-measured global temperature record, and the warmest May that wasn’t during an El Niño Pacific Ocean warming event, according to Dr. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

An international team of astronomers including Dutch astronomers Peter Barthel and Léon Koopmans (University of Groningen) reports the discovery of a unique case of a cosmic gravitational lens. Using several telescopes on the ground and in space, the scientists show that a distant radio galaxy, acting as a cosmic lens, distorts and magnifies the radiation of an even more distant mysterious dark object, thereby making that object visible.

Quebecers are particularly hostile toward the development of shale gas, but this aversion is driven less by ‘not in my backyard’ (NIMBY) attitudes than ‘not in anyone’s backyard (NIABY), according to a comparative study of 2,500 Quebecers and Americans conducted by Éric Montpetit and Erick Lachapelle of the University of Montreal’s Department of Political Science. Professors Barry G.

Increasingly, scientific findings indicate that an organism’s diet affects more than just general health and body condition. In an article published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, researchers from Nicolaus Copernicus University have found evidence that the diet of some animals must include cholesterol in order for them to enter necessary periods of energy conservation known as torpor.

Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it’s being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It took seven editors and 26 authors nine years to compile the first ever Reptile Atlas for all reptiles found in the southern tip of Africa. This huge collaborative effort resulted in the 485-page Atlas and Red List of the Reptiles of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland – a hardcover book launched recently that also contains the conservation status of the 421 recognised species and subspecies of reptiles found in these three countries.

Scientists at Tsinghua University, China, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, have designed an intrinsic-disperse nanocarbon architecture hybridizing N-doped graphene and SWCNTs, which can serve as a superior bifunctional electrocatalyst for both oxygen reduction and evolution reactions.

An international team of researchers comprised of Thomas Wesener, Museum Koenig, Bonn, Daniel Le, Field Museum, Chicago and Stephanie Loria, American Museum of Natural History, New York, discovered seven new species of chirping giant pill-millipedes on Madagascar. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.