Trawling the seabed doesn't just remove some of the fishes living there; it also makes some of the survivors thinner and less healthy by forcing them to use more energy finding less nutritious food. That's the conclusion of a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, based on the work Dr Andrew Frederick…

Scientists have discovered a large area of the deep seabed strewn with mounds of asphalt off the coast of Angola, hosting rich animal life. This is the first such discovery in the Atlantic proper or in the Southern Hemisphere, and the first time the creatures living around them have been studied in detail. It arises from…

Radiocarbon dating of human remains from one of the deepest prehistoric sites in the Near East throws into question widely-held ideas about how the first modern people spread across the world during the Palaeolithic era. The traditional view is that the first humans with anatomy like ours evolved in Africa, then from about 50,000 years…

Falling levels of nitrogen in the atmosphere across Europe may be much more economically beneficial than previously believed, according to a recent study. Indeed, scientists think the UK alone benefits by around £65 million a year. Levels of atmospheric nitrogen have fallen by around a quarter in Europe since 1990, mostly because of tighter rules…

Birds’ eggs show just how serious a problem river pollution remains in the UK’s former industrial heartlands, according to a new study. Scientists analysed the eggs of Eurasian Dippers living in 33 rivers in South Wales, comparing the eggs of birds living along urban waterways with those of their rural peers. The city-dwellers’ eggs contained…

You might assume getting richer would always make a country safer from drought and famine, but that turns out not to be the case. Instead, the very poorest countries seem to become more vulnerable in the early stages of development. There’s a crucial period before the benefits of modernisation start to kick in, during which…

Problems with how scientists communicate with the media and in how reefs’ health is assessed have created a skewed public understanding of coral bleaching, according to a new study. Coral bleaching is a widespread phenomenon in which corals lose their vivid colours. It’s a major concern to conservationists, as it can be triggered by rapid…

There are plenty of high-tech ideas to tackle pollution, but recent research suggests that some of the biggest gains in keeping our waterways clean could come from a more traditional technology – fences. Simply fencing off streams and drainage ditches so farm animals can’t deposit manure in and around them could cut levels of faecal…