A remarkably preserved horseshoe crab fossil from North America offers rare insight into some of the earliest known cases of animal disease in a Late Carboniferous swamp – more than 300 million years before the age of dinosaurs.

The specimen, uncovered from the mass-burial fossil deposit at the famous Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois in the US, shows more than 100 small pits across the front of its shell, representing one of the earliest documented examples of microbial or algal infection killing groups of these ancient aquatic animals.

New research reveals how the speed of ocean currents and the shape of the seabed influence the amount of heat flowing underneath Antarctic ice shelves, contributing to melting.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) used an autonomous underwater vehicle to survey beneath the Dotson Ice Shelf in the Amundsen Sea, an area of rapid glacial ice loss largely due to increasing ocean heat around and below ice shelves.

Researchers in China have discovered that a combination of bone biochar and humic acid can dramatically improve coastal saline soils and help olive trees thrive in these challenging environments. The study, published in Biochar, uncovers how these soil amendments work together to enhance soil structure, rebalance essential nutrients, and support healthy plant growth.

With natural disasters striking communities across the U.S. at an accelerating pace, the question of how to build homes that can endure them has never been more critical. New research spanning political science and civil engineering shows that the answer could lie at the intersection of smarter regulatory systems and stronger structures. University of Notre Dame political scientist Susan Ostermann and her team have identified the building code features that have the biggest impact on hazard resilience and translated those features into tangible, practical building solutions.

Galápagos is a living laboratory where every environmental decision matters. On Santa Cruz, the most populated island of the archipelago, freshwater is a limited and increasingly vulnerable resource due to urban growth, agricultural pressure, saltwater intrusion, and climate change. In this context, understanding how water behaves across the landscape becomes essential for water security.

Our study proposes a geomorphological approach to identify which watersheds offer the best conditions for water conservation, which require immediate intervention due to their susceptibility to erosion, and which could be suitable for sustainable agricultural activities.

For roughly two billion years of Earth’s early history, the atmosphere contained no oxygen, the essential ingredient required for complex life. Oxygen began building up during the period known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), but when and how it first entered the oceans has remained uncertain.

A new study published in Nature Communications shows that oxygen was absorbed from the atmosphere into the shallow oceans within just a few million years—a geological blink of an eye. Led by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the work provides new insight into one of the most important environmental shifts in Earth’s history.