(University of Texas at Austin) A new study by The University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated a possible link between life on Earth and the movement of continents. The findings show that sediment, which is often comprised from pieces of dead organisms, could play a key role in determining the speed of continental drift.

(University at Buffalo) As the Arctic warms, it's predicted to get wetter. But why? A new study looks to history for answers, examining what happened in the region during a period of warming some 8,000 years ago. The research finds evidence that in this ancient time, western Greenland became more humid, a trend often linked to increased precipitation. The study further shows that two different climactic processes may have contributed to this elevated humidity.

(Case Western Reserve University) Discoveries about the neurological processes by which flies stay steady in flight by researchers at Case Western Reserve University could help humans build more responsive drones or better-balanced robots.

(Lancaster University) Carbon losses caused by El Niño forest fires of 2015 and 2016 could be up to four times greater than thought.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) With each of its 10,000 pulses per second, the laser instrument aboard NASA's ICESat-2 is sending 300 trillion green photons of light to the ground and detecting the few that return: the method it uses to measure Earth's changing ice. By the morning of Oct. 3, ICESat-2 returned its first height measurements across the Antarctic ice sheet.

(Oregon Health & Science University) New research for the first time reveals the three-dimensional structure of a membrane channel that's critical in controlling blood pressure. The findings, published today in the open-access journal eLife, represent the first time the human epithelial sodium channel has been shown so precisely since it was first isolated and described through expression cloning more than two decades ago.

(University of Colorado at Boulder) In the last few years, the Vavilov Ice Cap in the Russian High Arctic has dramatically accelerated, sliding as much as 82 feet a day in 2015, according to a new multi-national, multi-institute study led by CIRES Fellow Mike Willis, an assistant professor of Geology at CU Boulder. That dwarfs the ice's previous average speed of about 2 inches per day and has challenged scientists' assumptions about the stability of the cold ice caps dotting Earth's high latitudes.

(Ruhr-University Bochum) Researchers have developed a new mechanism to protect enzymes from oxygen as biocatalysts in fuel cells. The enzymes, known as hydrogenases, are just as efficient as precious metal catalysts, but unstable when they come into contact with oxygen. They are therefore not yet suitable for technological applications. The new protective mechanism is based on oxygen-consuming enzymes that draw their energy from sugar.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) ICESat-2 scientists to investigate icy mysteriessoon after NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, launches on Sept. 15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, it will start collecting a terabyte of data a day to monitor the height of Earth's surface below.

(University of California - San Diego) A new study led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the Coral Reef Research Foundation (CRRF) in Palau describes a novel approach for predicting warm temperature-induced stress on corals from the sea surface through a deeper expanse ranging from 30-150 meters (100-500 feet) known as the mesophotic zone.

(Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies) Fog can act as a vector for microbes, transferring them long distances and introducing them into new environments. So reports an analysis of the microbiology of coastal fog, recently published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) New NASA-funded research has discovered that Arctic permafrost's expected gradual thawing and the associated release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere may actually be sped up by instances of a relatively little known process called abrupt thawing. Abrupt thawing takes place under a certain type of Arctic lake, known as a thermokarst lake that forms as permafrost thaws.

(Field Museum) A new study of the tools used to create Easter Island's giant statues hints at a society in which people collaborated and shared information.

(University of Washington) A team led by the University of Washington has created an environmentally friendly way to remove color from dyes in water in a matter of seconds.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) A stalled weather pattern led to persistent showers and thunderstorms moving up the eastern seaboard during the week of July 22, resulting in significant rainfall amounts and numerous flood warnings. NASA utilized satellite data to analyze and tally the rainfall from the storms.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite provided a rainfall and cloud analysis on powerful Typhoon Jongdari as it moves toward Japan. Jongdari follows another powerful typhoon that made landfall in Japan earlier this year.