As climate change brings more wildfires to the western United States, a rare fungal infection has also been on the rise. Valley fever is up more than sixfold in Arizona…
Author: ID
Discarded COVID-19 PPE such as masks can be deadly to wildlife
A Magellanic penguin in Brazil ingested a face mask. A hedgehog in England got itself entangled in a glove. An octopus off the coast of France was found seeking refuge…
‘Fathom’ seeks to unravel humpback whales’ soulful songs
In an opening scene of the new film Fathom, Michelle Fournet sits at her computer in the dark, headphones on. The marine ecologist at Cornell University is listening to a…
A new book uses stories from tsunami survivors to decode deadly waves
TsunamiJames Goff and Walter DudleyOxford Univ., $34.95 On March 27, 1964, Ted Pederson was helping load oil onto a tanker in Seward, Alaska, when a magnitude 9.2 quake struck. Within…
Something mysteriously wiped out about 90 percent of sharks 19 million years ago
About 19 million years ago, something terrible happened to sharks. Fossils gleaned from sediments in the Pacific Ocean reveal a previously unknown and dramatic shark extinction event, during which populations…
A new book explores how military funding shaped the science of oceanography
Science on a MissionNaomi OreskesUniv. of Chicago, $40 In 2004, Japanese scientists captured the first underwater images of a live giant squid, a near-mythical, deep-ocean creature whose only interactions with…
Dazzling underwater photos capture new views and scientific detail of fish larvae
The open ocean is a veritable soup of tiny critters, including newborn fishes. It’s hard to learn about them, though, because they are mere millimeters long and semitransparent. When netted…
How kelp forests off California are responding to an urchin takeover
Joshua Smith has been diving in kelp forests in Monterey Bay along the central coast of California since 2012. Back then, he says, things looked very different. Being underwater was…
Some bacteria are suffocating sea stars, turning the animals to goo
The mysterious culprit behind a deadly sea star disease is not an infection, as scientists once thought. Instead, multiple types of bacteria living within millimeters of sea stars’ skin deplete…
Earth’s oceans are storing record-breaking amounts of heat
Pandemic-related shutdowns may have spared Earth’s atmosphere some greenhouse gas emissions last year, but the world continued to warm. Water temperature measurements from around the globe indicate that the total…
