Tagging and monitoring whales can reveal their extensive migration routes, but not how far—or whether—their ancestors roamed five million years ago. UC Berkeley researcher Larry Taylor knew that present-day barnacle shells take up differently weighted oxygen atoms from bodies of water. That creates a record of the oceans they’ve been in as passengers on whales. To see if barnacles had the same properties long ago, Taylor hunted down fossils that lived on early humpback whales, and bingo: They did. He hopes to shed light on prehistoric whales’ movements, as well as on the evolution of the oceans.
As scientists explore how industrialized agriculture is affecting U.S. weather and climate, an MIT study offers one notion. It says corn belt climes are changed by the corn itself—millions of acres of plants that take in carbon dioxide, then expel water, causing lower temperatures and more rain.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains at least 88,000 tons of plastic—and almost half of it is fishing nets. A company called Bureo is trying to solve the ocean’s plastic problem by recycling nets into skateboards, surfboard fins, and sunglasses. At facilities in California and Chile, Bureo processes nets into pellets, then applies pressure and heat as the pellets are injected into molds—one win in the war on plastic pollution.