Taxonomy term

Each year between 900 million and 4 billion metric tons of dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa is swept into the atmosphere and blown around the world. In places like Texas, the dust often leads to poor air quality. A new study suggests that desert dust may also suppress the formation of severe storms and hurricanes in the southern United States.

It seems like you can find wireless internet almost anywhere now, but the backbone of the internet is wired: Infrastructure such as fiber optic cables, data centers, traffic exchanges and hubs keeps us connected. In many coastal cities, however, these critical communication pieces are facing increasing risk from rising seas. A new study shows that thousands of kilometers of cables and hundreds of internet traffic hubs will be inundated by rising sea levels in the next 15 years, putting coastal cities like New York, Miami and Seattle at risk for widespread disruptions.

About 2,200 years ago, a Chinese noblewoman was buried in a tomb with a menagerie of animals, including 12 horses, a leopard, a lynx and a species of gibbon unknown to modern science. The new ape, identified using detailed cranial and dental measurements as a new genus and species — Junzi imperialis — may represent the first ape to have gone extinct due to human influence after the last ice age.

An active volcano in central Ecuador may be the largest musical instrument on Earth: After eruptions in 2015, Cotopaxi’s newly configured crater started emitting distinctly musical rumblings that scientists may be able to use to monitor future activity at the volcano.