They pollinate our flowers, vegetables and fruit. They spread deadly diseases. They flash in the summer night. They bore into the wood in our homes. And they serve as supper for birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals – including people. Insects are seemingly everywhere, and scientists have been striving to better grasp their history on Earth…”The Earth 480 million years ago looked more like Mars than our Earth today: nothing but rock, with no life on land. The oceans were full of life, but life out of the water is really quite challenging,” said evolutionary biologist Karl Kjer of Rutgers University in New Jersey, another of the study leaders.
Warm Pacific may paradoxically cause U.S. winter freeze: study
Unusually warm western Pacific waters linked to global warming may be the paradoxical cause of a bone-chilling winter in parts of the United States this year, a scientific study said on Thursday…Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, who wrote in 2011 that a melting of Arctic ice may cause cold snaps, said the Pacific had a similar pattern of heavy rainfall in 2011-12 but the winter was mild in the United States. “In both cases the jet stream’s path was extremely amplified or wavy, which is exactly the sort of behavior we expect to occur more frequently in association with rapid Arctic warming,” she told Reuters.