Latest news with #Nature
WIRED
2 hours ago
- Climate
- WIRED
The World Is Producing More Food than Ever—but Not for Long
Jun 28, 2025 7:00 AM Even America's richest farmlands can't outrun climate collapse. That's everyone's problem. Photograph:This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Globally, humanity is producing more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in just a handful of breadbaskets. More than one-third of the world's wheat and barley exports come from Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive farmlands, including major crop-growing regions in the United States, are on track to see the sharpest drops in harvests due to climate change. That's bad news not just for farmers, but also for everyone who eats—especially as it becomes harder and more expensive to feed a more crowded, hungrier world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario, six key staple crops will see an 11.2 percent decline by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even as farmers try to adapt. And the largest drops aren't occurring in the poorer, more marginal farmlands, but in places that are already major food producers. These are regions like the US Midwest that have been blessed with good soil and ideal weather for raising staples like maize and soy. But when that weather is less than ideal, it can drastically reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme weather has already begun to eat into harvests this year: Flooding has destroyed rice in Tajikistan, cucumbers in Spain, and bananas in Australia. Severe storms in the US this spring caused millions of dollars in damages to crops. In past years, severe heat has led to big declines in blueberries, olives, and grapes. And as the climate changes, rising average temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are poised to diminish yields, while weather events like droughts and floods reaching greater extremes could wipe out harvests more often. 'It's not a mystery that climate change will affect our food production,' said Andrew Hultgren, an agriculture researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 'That's the most weather-exposed sector in the economy.' Farmers are doing what they can—testing different crop varieties that can better withstand changes in the climate, shifting the timing of when they sow, tweaking their use of fertilizers and water, and investing in infrastructure like water reservoirs. The question is whether these adaptations can continue to keep pace with warming. To figure this out, Hultgren and his team looked at crop and weather data from 54 countries around the world dating back to the 1940s. They specifically looked at how farmers have adapted to changes in the climate that have already occurred, focusing on maize, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, and soybean. Combined, these crops provide two-thirds of humanity's calories. In the Nature paper, Hultgren and his team reported that in general, adaptation can slow some crop losses due to climate change, but not all of them. And the decrease in our food production could be devastating: For every degree Celsius of warming, global food production is likely to decline by 120 calories per person per day. That's even taking into account how climate change can make growing seasons longer and how more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can encourage plant growth. In the moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario—leading to between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100—rising incomes and adaptations would only offset one-third of crop losses around the world. 'Looking at that 3 degrees centigrade warmer [than the year 2000] future corresponds to about a 13 percent loss in daily recommended per capita caloric consumption,' Hultgren said. 'That's like everyone giving up breakfast … about 360 calories for each person, for each day.' The researchers also mapped out where the biggest crop declines—and increases—are likely to occur as the climate warms. As the world's most productive farmlands get hit hard, cooler countries like Russia and Canada are on track for larger harvests. The map below shows in red where crop yields are poised to shrink and in blue where they may expand: Some of the biggest crop-growing regions in the world are likely to experience the largest declines in yield as the climate changes. Illustration: Springer Nature The results complicate the assumption that poor countries will directly bear the largest losses in food production due to climate change. The wealthy, large-scale food growers may see the biggest drop-offs, according to the study. However, poor countries will still be affected, since many crops are internationally traded commodities, and the biggest producers are exporters. A smaller harvest means higher food prices around the world. Less wealthy regions are also facing their own crop declines from disasters and climate change, though at smaller scales. All the while, the global population is rising, albeit much more slowly than in the past. It's a recipe for more food insecurity for more people. Rice is an exception to this trend. Its overall yields are actually likely to increase in a warmer world: Rice is a versatile crop, and unlike the other staples, it benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. 'Rice turns out to be the most flexibly adapted crop and largely through adaptations protected from large losses under even a high warming future,' Hultgren said. That's a boon for regions like South and Southeast Asia. Decreasing the available calories isn't the only way climate change is altering food, however. The nutrition content can change with shifts in rainfall and temperature too, though Hultgren and his colleagues didn't account for this in their study. Scientists have previously documented how higher levels of carbon dioxide can cause crops like rice to have lower levels of iron, zinc, and B vitamins. So the food we will be eating in the future may be more scarce and less nutritious as well. And while climate change can impair our food supply, the way we make food in turn harms the climate. About one-third of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions stem from food production, just under half of that from meat and dairy. That's why food production has to be a major front in how we adapt to climate change, and reduce rising temperatures overall.
New Indian Express
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
IN PICS: Nature's monsoon art show in Kerala
Kerala Kerala IN PICS: Nature's monsoon art show in Kerala Nature, in her quiet grace, weaves beauty into every unnoticed moment. These moments seek no attention. But, if observed closely, everyday sights become extraordinary. She creates moments that, if we pause, will stay with us forever — maybe not as memories, but feelings. TNIE lensman A Sanesh presents some frames from his monsoon series, which he calls Nature's Art Show
Yahoo
a day ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Aimless wandering is actually good for the brain
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission. The brain is a complex organ. Not only is it made up of multiple parts, all of which have important roles to play in processing information, but the way that the brain learns can also change based on what activities you're taking part in. For the longest time, the act of zoning out and aimlessly wandering around town, a store, or any other venue has often been viewed in a negative light. However, new research published in the journal Nature suggests that it might actually be the opposite. Instead of being bad for you, aimlessly wandering can unlock new potential for the brain to learn faster. Today's Top Deals Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Ring Video Doorbell deals Memorial Day security camera deals: Reolink's unbeatable sale has prices from $29.98 The act of learning without much structure, often called unsupervised learning, can actually be extremely helpful to the brain's development, the researchers discovered. According to their findings, mice that were exposed to unstructured environments and allowed to aimlessly wander through their surroundings were actually quicker to learn to complete reward-linked tasks than mice that weren't exposed to those environments. This research raises new questions about the way the brain learns. To discover this, researchers had to capture the activity of tens of thousands of neurons at the same time. When looking back at the data, the scientists uncovered a startling new truth: Learning can occur even when there aren't any specific tasks or goals involved. As the mice explored their environment, the neurons found in the visual cortex, a section of the brain responsible for processing information, actually encode visual features into the brain. This helps build an internal model of the world around the animal. Then, once a more goal-oriented task is placed in front of them, the information obtained by aimlessly wandering actually helped speed up learning for those more specific tasks. Of course, understanding exactly how our brains learn is a tough task. However, research like this is slowly helping us connect the dots. The researchers involved in this most recent study say that even though you might not feel like you're doing anything while aimlessly wandering around, you could be setting your brain up for faster learning down the line. It's unclear at the moment exactly how this might translate to the human brain. But given how similarly the brains of certain animals work compared to ours, it's likely that the way the brain learns in animals will be similar to how the human brain picks up new things, too. Hopefully, future research into the topic will provide us with even more data to dig into. For now, researchers at least have a good idea of where to look to start understanding the how the brain learns, and it starts with the visual cortex. More Top Deals Amazon gift card deals, offers & coupons 2025: Get $2,000+ free See the
The National
a day ago
- Science
- The National
James Webb Space Telescope's first 'alien world' discovery unlocks new era of planet-hunting
Scientists have unveiled groundbreaking direct images of a planet outside of our own solar system, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. It is the first exoplanet discovered by the telescope, proving it can detect lighter and more elusive worlds orbiting distant stars. The planet, named TWA 7b, is situated near a young star about 34 lightyears away, in the constellation Hydra. It is the lightest exoplanet ever seen through direct imaging, with a mass similar to Saturn and about one-third that of Jupiter, as scientists are now able to study smaller, cooler planets that are more difficult to detect. The findings were published in the Nature science journal on Wednesday. Dr Anne-Marie Lagrange, a researcher with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), led the study by an international team. 'Our observations reveal a strong candidate for a planet shaping the structure of the TWA 7 debris disc, and its position is exactly where we expected to find a planet of this mass,' she said. How the planet was found While thousands of exoplanets have been found over the past three decades, most have been detected through indirect methods. These included measuring the dimming of a star as a planet passes in front of it or by watching for tiny movements in a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. Only some have ever been directly imaged, and those have typically been enormous gas giants. TWA 7b was spotted using a powerful coronagraph installed on Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri), a telescope attachment developed the CNRS and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. The coronagraph acted like a solar eclipse, blocking out the light of a star so that the much fainter objects orbiting nearby could be seen. This technique helped astronomers spot a faint source of light hidden inside one of the thin dust rings surrounding the star TWA 7. After ruling out objects such as background galaxies or image glitches, scientists realised the signal was coming from a planet, one that had never been seen before. Computer simulations showed that the planet was placed exactly where there is a strange gap in the star's narrow dust ring, which meant strong evidence that its gravity is shaping the ring's structure. Building on past space telescope discoveries Since the telescope's science operations started in 2022, it has helped scientists make several discoveries. These included helping to confirm the chemical composition of atmospheres of other planets and extreme weather patterns on gas giants. JWST's predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, also made valuable discoveries in the early era of direct imaging. It captured the first visible-light image of an exoplanetary system in 2008, however, it lacked the sensitivity to see planets smaller than Jupiter. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope is now offering more advanced techniques. 'This observatory enables us to capture images of planets with masses similar to those in the solar system, which represents an exciting step forward in our understanding of planetary systems, including our own,' said Mathilde Malin, co-author of the study. What comes next The team behind the discovery thinks Webb could soon be able to spot planets with just 10 per cent the mass of Jupiter, getting close to the size of Neptune and 'super-Earths', planets outside the solar system that are larger than Earth but smaller than icy planets like Neptune and Uranus. TWA 7 b also gives scientists a roadmap for how future space and ground-based telescopes that might detect even smaller, more Earth-like planets.
Yomiuri Shimbun
a day ago
- Science
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Humans Adapted to Diverse Habitats before Trekking out of Africa
Small bands of Homo sapiens made a few failed forays leaving our home continent before the species finally managed to launch a major dispersal out of Africa roughly 50,000 years ago, going first into Europe and Asia and eventually the rest of the world. So why was this migration successful after the prior ones were not? New research is offering insight. It documents how human hunter-gatherers in Africa began about 70,000 years ago to embrace a greater diversity of habitats such as thick forests and arid deserts, acquiring an adaptability useful for tackling the wide range of conditions awaiting beyond the continent. 'Why the dispersal 50,000 years ago was successful is a big question in human origins research. Our results suggest that one part of the reason is that humans had developed the ecological flexibility to survive in challenging habitats,' said Loyola University Chicago archeologist Emily Hallett, coleader of the study published in the journal Nature. Looking at an array of archeological sites in Africa, the study detailed how human populations expanded their range into the forests of Central and West Africa and the deserts of North Africa in the roughly 20,000 years preceding this dispersal. Some examples of archeological sites dating to this time that illustrate the expansion of human niches to harsh deserts include locales in Libya and Namibia, and examples of expansion to forested habitats include locales in Malawi and South Africa. Homo sapiens arose roughly 300,000 years ago, inhabiting grasslands, savannahs and various other African ecosystems. 'Starting from about 70,000 years ago, we see that they suddenly start to intensify this exploitation of diverse habitats and also expand into new types of habitat in a way we don't see before. They exploit more types of woodland, more types of closed canopy forests, more types of deserts, highlands and grasslands,' said archeologist and study coleader Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany. 'An Ice Age was coming, which means drier conditions in parts of Africa. It seems possible that humans responded to this squeeze by learning how to adapt to new niches,' Scerri added. The increased ecological flexibility of the species appears to have reflected cultural and social advances such as passing knowledge from one generation to the next and engaging in cooperative behavior, the researchers said. 'This must have entailed profound changes in their interaction with the natural environment, as it allowed them to occupy not only new environments in Africa, but entirely new conditions in Eurasia as well,' said evolutionary biologist and study coleader Michela Leonardi of the Natural History Museum in London. 'Another way to phrase this is that the ability to live in a variety of environments in Africa is not directly the adaptation that allowed a successful [migration] out of Africa, but rather a sign that humans by that point were the ultimate generalist, able to tackle environments that went from deep forest to dry deserts,' said University of Cambridge evolutionary ecologist and study coleader Andrea Manica. 'This flexibility is the key trait that allowed them, later on, to conquer novel challenges, all the way to the coldest tundras in Siberia.' Trekking out of Africa, Homo sapiens encountered not only new environments and unfamiliar animals and plants, but also other human species, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans. The ecological flexibility learned in Africa may have provided an edge when Homo sapiens encountered these other humans, both of whom disappeared relatively soon thereafter, the researchers said. Genetic evidence indicates that today's people outside of Africa can trace their ancestry to the population of humans, numbering perhaps only in the thousands, who engaged in that pioneering migration out of Africa approximately 50,000 years ago. 'I think that adaptability and innovation are hallmarks of our species, and that they allowed us to succeed in every environment we encountered,' Hallett said. 'At the same time, we are almost too good at adapting to different places, to the detriment of most other species on Earth.'
