Rice University climatologist Sylvia Dee has been awarded the 2025 Nanne Weber Early Career Award from the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology Section.

Richard Gordon, the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geophysics in Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, has been awarded the 2025 Walter H. Bucher Medal by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Carrie Masiello, the W. Maurice Ewing Professor of Biogeochemistry at Rice University, has been elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world’s largest Earth and space science association.

Sea foam is a common sight along the coastline as breaking waves churn up air and algae. Now, a study in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology reports that sea foam from several beaches along North Carolina’s coast contain higher levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) compared to the water below. Some foam samples had more PFAS than what is allowed in drinking water, highlighting the need to clean up and reduce environmental PFAS pollution.

For the more than 242 million years that lizards and snakes appear in the fossil record, they show up as mostly pieces of lizard jaws and snake vertebrae. Exactly why these parts survive as fossils has been a mystery—until now. In a new study published in Paleobiology, Dr. Hank Woolley from the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County’s Dinosaur Institute looks at the entire history of squamates (the reptile group that includes lizards, snakes, and mosasaurs among others) to understand why only certain parts show up—the bias of the record—and to quantify that bias for the first time. Woolley and his co-authors found that physical characteristics like bone density and body size, along with where the animals lived and died, were the main predictors of how complete a fossil would be. Woolley identifies these patterns as megafilters, which refer to processes that have an outsized effect on the way we understand the fossil record. This unprecedented high-resolution view of the group’s biodiversity through multiple mass-extinction events illuminates mysteries of squamates’ evolutionary history and can help guide future work that examines how animals are preserved as fossils.