During a three week field trip, ecologists studied an entire glacier and found that microbes drastically reduce surface reflectivity and have an impact on the amount of sunlight that is reflected into space.

The researchers say they work will help improve climate change models, because they have neglected the role of microbes in darkening the Earth's surface. 
The study was carried out on the Mittivakkat Glacier in south east Greenland during the summer of 2012, which was the hottest summer and thus the fastest melting season recorded for 150 years.

Three years ago, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers took a close look at a connectivity phenomenon - how fire ants work together to build waterproof rafts to stay alive.

After examining the edges and tops of rafts, they discovered that ants grip each other with their mandibles and legs at a force of 400 times their body weight. Next they did what anyone would do.

The standard cosmological model is the frame of reference for generations of scientists but some question its ability to accurately reproduce what is observed in the nearby universe. 

Dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies defy the accepted model of galaxy formation,  according to an international team of astrophysicists, and recent attempts to wedge them into the model are flawed, they believe. 

David Merritt, professor of astrophysics at Rochester Institute of Technology, says their work pokes holes in the accepted model of the origin and evolution of the universe. According to the standard paradigm, 23 percent of the mass of the universe is shaped by invisible (insert your definition here) known as dark matter.

Americans lead the world in adult science literacy, it has nearly tripled since 1988. What other trend occurred since 1988? A lot fewer people read newspapers.

If people are smarter about science than ever, and they read fewer newspapers than ever, newspapers were not doing a very good job covering science. And in the 2000s, the 'churnalism' culture, pretending to be doing journalism when it is just a rehashed press release (such as this) caused people to stop subscribing and just sign up for a press release RSS news feed.

But analysts and journalists alike have blamed the Internet for the demise of newspapers. It's been claimed so much that people assume it must be true. 

Quebecers are particularly hostile toward the development of natural gas, but this aversion is driven less by 'not in my backyard' (NIMBY) attitudes than 'not in anyone's backyard (NIABY), according to a comparative study of 2,500 Quebecers and Americans conducted by Éric Montpetit and Erick Lachapelle of the University of Montreal's Department of Political Science.

Fossilized fish specimens from the Canadian Rockies, known as Metaspriggina,
dates from the Cambrian period (around 505 million years ago), shows pairs of exceptionally well-preserved arches near the front of its body. The first of these pairs, closest to the head, eventually led to the evolution of jaws in vertebrates, the first time this feature has been seen so early in the fossil record.