Why Elephants Will Never Jump: Scientists Reveal the Jaw-Dropping Truth - Futura, le média qui explore le monde

Study finds giant carcasses create long-lasting nutrient hotspots and grazing zones An elephant's death leaves a footprint that can linger on the land for nearly a decade, scientists say. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tracked the carcasses of 40 elephants that had died between eight days and eight years earlier in South Africa's Kruger National Park. Researchers found the massive bodies first wipe out nearby plants by blocking sunlight, creating stark "cold spots" where both plant and microbial diversity plunge under a surge of nutrients like ammonium that can hit 3,000 times the norm, reports the Washington Post. "That amount of ammonium was not on my bingo card," Kruger National Park employee Tercia Midzi tells BBC Wildlife.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.