Month: October 2016

What Happens When Antarctica Melts? Environment 

What Happens When Antarctica Melts?

Science Connected, ,

By Kate Stone Between December 2001 and February 2002, the Antarctic continent underwent a season of intense melting. Aside from the loss of ice, what really happens when Antarctica melts? New research reveals that the changes range from sped-up microbial food webs to shifting penguin populations. The clash of two climatic cycles, the Southern Annular Mode and the El Niño Southern Oscillation, produced an unusually warm and windy spring season across Antarctica back in 2001–2002. This climate event melted glaciers including the Totten Glacier, thinned lake ice, and caused startling…

Read More
failed experiments move science forward Health STEM Education 

Failed Experiments Move Science Forward

Science Connected,

Experiments that don’t go as expected and trials that yield negative results are critical for moving science forward. Research scientists discuss the value of failed experiments. A new series for ResearchGate by Katherine LindemannArticle contributed by Michele Heisler Researchers don’t dream of negative studies, but experiments that don’t go as expected and trials that yield negative results are critical for moving science forward. To highlight this important part of the research process, we asked research scientists to speak about their own experiences with “failure.” Our first contributor is Michele Heisler, a…

Read More
global warming Environment Science Videos 

Global Warming: What’s Really Warming the Earth?

Science Connected, ,

Dr. Joe Hanson explores the possible causes of global warming in this episode of It’s Okay To Be Smart.   References and Further Reading July 2016 is hottest on record NOAA’s State of the Climate July 2016 Bloomberg’s climate change data viz project Solar activity and temperature show opposite trend Milankovitch cycles (I left out eccentricity because it operates on scales so long that it doesn’t affect short-term climate change) Connecting climate models with actual temperature changes NASA Goddard’s Gavin Schmidt explains the history of the instrumental temperature record Last time…

Read More
DNA Analysis Reveals Four Distinct Giraffe Species Genetics and Heredity Zoology 

DNA Analysis Reveals Four Distinct Giraffe Species

Science Connected,

By Katherine Lindemann Researchers have long recognized only a single species of giraffe, thought to be made up of several subspecies. However, a research collaboration has now identified four distinct species. Conservation biologist Julian Fennessy of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, geneticist Axel Janke of the Senckenberg Research Institute, and their colleagues collected and analyzed samples from giraffes across the African continent. Their results appear in the journal Current Biology. ResearchGate: When and why did you start genetically testing giraffes across Africa? Julian Fennessy: When I approached Axel Janke to help…

Read More