Earth Sciences

When a new mom gazes at her baby, it’s not just her mood that lights up – it’s also a brain region associated with emotion processing, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The study, published in the current issue of NeuroImage, explored what happens in the brain when mothers are shown pictures of their babies, as well as images of unfamiliar infants. While all the photos increased the amount of activity in a part of the brain associated with emotion, the imag

The Mediterranean Sea was a desert, millions of years ago. In contrast, the Sahara Desert was once a lush, green landscape dotted with lakes and ponds. Evidence of this past verdancy lies hidden beneath the sands of Egypt and Libya, in the form of a huge aquifer of fresh groundwater. An international team of geologists and physicists has found that this groundwater has been flowing slowly northward (at about the rate grass grows) for the past million years. Their findings have been accepted for March

Rainfall but Ultimately Increases Its Intensity

Air pollution and smoke suppress rainfall, but cause the remaining rain amounts to fall in greater intensities, with lightning and hail, says a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The researcher, Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld, was one of a group of scientists that included also participants from Germany, Sweden and Brazil who conducted measurements of smoke and its impact on the development of clouds and precipitation i

Against incredible odds, researchers working in separate sites, thousands of miles apart in Antarctica have found what they believe are the fossilized remains of two species of dinosaurs previously unknown to science.

One of the two finds, which were made less than a week apart, is an early carnivore that would have lived many millions of years after the other, a plant-eating beast, roamed the Earth. One was found at the sea bottom, the other on a mountaintop.

Journey to the bo

For the first time, researchers have identified organic material in interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), gathered from the Earth’s stratosphere, that was made before the birth of our Solar System.

The material was identified on the basis of its carbon isotopic composition, which is different from the carbon found on Earth and in other parts of the Solar System. Isotopes are variations of elements that differ from each other in the number of neutrons they have, making them similar chem

The permafrost in the mires of subarctic Sweden is undergoing dramatic changes. The part of the soils that thaws in the summer, the so-called active layer, has become deeper since 1970 and the permafrost has disappeared altogether in some locations. This has lead to significant changes in the vegetation composition and subsequent increase in emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Methane is 25 times more potent compared to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas.

Behind these new findin