News by Subject Earth Science

Sound generated by seismic events on the seabed can be used to determine the temperature of Earth's warming oceans.

Subtropical Storm Alpha has formed near the coast of Portugal, becoming the first named storm using the Greek Alphabet list, now that the annual list of names is exhausted. NASA's Aqua satellite obtained visible imagery of the new storm.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided an infrared image of Tropical Depression 22 in the Gulf of Mexico during the early morning hours of Sept. 18. TD22 is expected to become a tropical storm, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

The list of hurricane names is officially used up with the development of the 23rd tropical cyclone of the year. Tropical Storm Wilfred just formed in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean today, Sept. 18. Using a NASA satellite rainfall product that incorporates data from satellites and observations, NASA estimated Wilfred's rainfall rates.

Using a NASA satellite rainfall product that incorporates data from satellites and observations, NASA estimated Hurricane Teddy's rainfall rates. Teddy is a major hurricane in the Central North Atlantic Ocean.

Tropical Storm Noul made landfall in central Vietnam on Sept. 17 and NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of the storm over Laos. Noul was weakening as it moves toward Thailand where it is forecast to dissipate.

Russian scientists studied the trends in the evolution of amino acid sequences of proteins in vertebrates and insects. External factors can be considered as a reason for positive selection affecting genomic positions and serve as an essential aspect of the rapid evolution. But the effect of epistasis is manifested in positions under negative selection, as a result of which substitutions occur less often in them - they evolve more slowly.

A new study from the Tai Chimpanzee Project in Ivory Coast and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, shows that orphaned male chimpanzees are less competitive and have fewer offspring of their own than those who continue to live with their mothers. The remaining puzzle is, what is it that their mothers provide that keeps chimpanzees healthy and competitive?