News by Subject Earth Science

This new study applied X-ray imaging to several 3-million-year-old fossils in order to untangle the story of key pigments in ancient animals and reveal how we might recognize the chemical signatures of specific red pigments in long extinct animals to determine how they evolved.

Researchers have for the first time detected chemical traces of red pigment in an ancient fossil -- an exceptionally well-preserved mouse, not unlike today's field mice, that roamed the fields of what is now the German village of Willershausen around 3 million years ago.

In Mexicali, Mexico, an uncontrolled epidemic of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, one of the deadliest tickborne diseases in the Americas, has affected more than 1,000 people since 2008. A binational team of researchers led by the University of California, Davis, has conducted the first comprehensive study to examine risk factors for the disease in Mexicali. Researchers examined dogs, ticks, and surveyed households in 200 neighborhoods.

For the first time it is possible to measure, simultaneously and with extreme precision, four rare molecular variants of carbon dioxide (CO2) using a novel laser instrument. As a new type of geothermometer, the laser-spectroscopy-based measurement device is significant for scientific disciplines investigating, for example, climatic conditions in Earth's history. It was developed by a German-French research team with environmental physicists from Heidelberg University.

Governments seeking to help their most vulnerable residents prepare for hurricanes and other disasters should create community-based information campaigns ahead of time, according to a Rutgers study of economically disadvantaged New Jerseyans in the areas hardest hit by Superstorm Sandy.

Anthropologists discovered a tool made out of high-quality translucent jadeite with an intact rosewood handle at a site where the ancient Maya processed salt in Belize. The discovery of these high-quality materials -- jadeite and rosewood -- used as utilitarian tools, demonstrates that salt workers played an important role in the Classic Maya marketplace economy more than 1,000 years ago.

Ivan Nekhaev, a postdoc at St. Petersburg University, studied snails of the genus Boreocingula -- tiny gastropods as small as half a centimeter -- and first discovered that Arctic micromolluscs can show signs of pseudohermaphroditism. Boreocingula martyni adult females grow underdeveloped male genital organs.