Researchers led by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have created the first global atlas of the influence of tides on coastal rivers. The regions surrounding these coastal rivers are particularly susceptible to flooding, especially with advancing climate change. The freely accessible world map shows the effects at a glance.

New analyses of ancient ice from Antarctica and the air contained inside it are extending the history of Earth’s climate records and expanding researchers’ understanding of how the planet has changed over the last 3 million years.

s human-caused climate change continues to raise temperatures across the globe, understanding how birds regulate their temperature is vital for their conservation. But how much heat birds emit—an invisible spectrum of radiation known as mid-infrared—has never been studied, until now. Published in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology, a groundbreaking collaboration between material engineers and museum biologists explored the impact of mid-infrared on birds for the first time in history, reflecting the hidden prism of light, heat, and color in bird feathers.  

It’s long been known that habitat plays a role in bird coloration, a phenomenon described by biologists through things like Gloger’s rule, which predicts that animals like birds living in hot, humid areas will be visibly darker than those in dry, cool areas. Color is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, a visible wavelength that humans can see part of (the visible spectrum), and birds can see even more of (the ultraviolet spectrum), but heat, or infrared, exists outside the bounds of what either humans or birds can see. Infrared is broken down into the heat animals absorb (near-infrared) but not the heat they emit (mid-infrared). The interdisciplinary team of scientists measured both in the new study.

Sea ice around Antarctica expanded for several decades until a dramatic decline in 2015. The reasons behind this are revealed by research from the University of Gothenburg.