High Mountain Asia’s shrinking glaciers linked to monsoon changes
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 30-Aug-2025 19:11 ET (30-Aug-2025 23:11 GMT/UTC)
Glaciers across High Mountain Asia are losing more than 22 gigatons of ice per year. The impact of a warming climate on glacial loss is undisputed—this new study provides the first evidence that seasonal shifts in rainfall and snowfall patterns, particularly of the South Asian monsoons, are also exacerbating glacier melting across the region.
A new UC Berkeley-led study provides fire-prone communities with actionable data on how wildfire mitigation strategies can reduce the destructiveness of wildfires by as much as 50%. In the study, the researchers used state-of-the-art wildfire simulation tools, combined with real-world data from five of the most destructive fires that occurred in California before 2022, to quantify the impact of home hardening and defensible space on wildfire risk.
MIT researchers designed molecules that can serve as the electrolyte in a lithium-ion battery and then quickly break apart at the end of the battery’s life, making it easier to recycle all of the components.
A research team led by Nick Strausfeld at the University of Arizona made an unexpected discovery: The brain of Jiangfengia, a creature that lived in the lower Cambrian, is very similar to that of living crustaceans. This places the extinct animal in the ancestry of insects and crustaceans, not spiders and their relatives, as had been previously assumed.
Humans could learn a thing or two from orangutans when it comes to maintaining a balanced, protein-filled diet. Great apes native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia, orangutans are marvels of adaptation to the vagaries of food supply in the wild, according to an international team of researchers led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick scientist. The critically endangered primates outshine modern humans in avoiding obesity through their balanced choices of food and exercise, the scientists found. The researchers reported their findings, based on 15 years of firsthand observations of wild orangutans in the jungles of Borneo, in Science Advances.