environmental science research for everyone
Carpenter ants play an important role in an ecosystem; they break down wood into smaller pieces that will ultimately become part of the soil. But a parasitic ant can rapidly take over and destroy a colony by simply disguising herself through chemical means.
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How the bacteria living inside of us may protect us against harmful infections.
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Two groups of citizen scientists in the UK discovered something previously unknown to science– toads living in trees. Read on to learn about how citizen science and collaborations with scientists can lead to more interesting questions and discoveries.
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Though you may expect to only spot wildlife in natural areas such as parks, urban animal visitors are likely more common than you’d think! What kind of animals might be spotted in human-dominated areas, and how do they interact with our backyards?
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Increasing carbon in soils has potential to help fight climate change and support crop growth, but researchers are still figuring out if and how we can do both at the same time. Read on to find out if they’ve discovered a solution!
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When a volcano erupts, what happens to plants growing nearby? Some are buried by volcanic tephra, dust and rocks thrown into the air by the volcano. Amazingly, newly published results suggest that this might not kill the plant community under the debris.
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Featured image caption: Sea cucumbers are echinoderms that live on the ocean floor worldwide. Some species are also edible and
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Microplastics are small plastic particles ranging in size from 1μm (the size of a human hair) to 5mm (the size of a pencil-top eraser) that don’t dissolve in water and are usually fragmented from larger pieces of plastics. That sounds like something that should never end up on our plates, right? Well, researchers have found that these small plastics have, unfortunately, found their way into our food chain.
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In the beginning, Earth’s atmosphere had no oxygen. Then photosynthesis made life as we know it possible, produced much of our mineable iron, and caused an ice age.
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No, it’s not a riddle– scientists have been exploring the noisy underwater world of fish since the late 1800s. With the dawn of a new online database, now you can too.
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