Millennia of ice, atmosphere are stored in this Colorado lab

By Dilpreet Raju Medill Reports Thousands of meters of ice are kept in below-freezing temperatures so climate researchers can analyze what the Earth’s climate was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. Climatologists can then take bits of the ice, which hold thousands of years of undisturbed snow, to extract what concentrations of greenhouse gases […]

Salmonella infections linked to poorer colon cancer outcomes

By Dilpreet Raju Medill Reports Salmonella could pose a much more long-term health risk than just upending weekend plans with food-poisoning symptoms. According to a study published late last year in in part done by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago, salmonella infection is considered an environmental risk factor for colon cancer. Researchers at […]

Hands of Doomsday Clock now 90 seconds from midnight

The Doomsday clock shows the top left quadrant of a standard analog clock. The hour hand is at 11 hours and the minute hand is at 90 seconds from midnight. Below the clock, on the same poster display, reads "It is 90 seconds to midnight" in all capital letters.

By Dilpreet Raju Medill Reports Scientists and leaders of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock on Tuesday to their closest ever position to midnight, a metaphorical barometer for how close the planet is to human-forced annihilation. The hands now sit at 90 seconds to midnight. This is the […]

Penn State Ice and Climate Research Center aims to understand our rapidly warming world

Sierra Melton on field trip in 2019.

By Chelsea Zhao, Dilpreet Raju and Ilana Wolchinsky Medill Reports As the Earth warms, researchers at the Ice and Climate Exploration Research Center (PSICE) at Pennsylvania State University are interested in how we can expect glaciers, those dense bodies of ice that move under their own weight, to react to a drastically changing environment. Extreme […]

The geological importance of caves to time climate change

Researcher Paul Töchterle investigates for samples at the bottom of a cave in the U.K.

By Dilpreet Raju Medill Reports Some of the interweaving drivers of Earth’s climate change remain a mystery, but many of the world’s leading paleoclimatologists work every day to fill in the gaps. Paul Töchterle, a geological Ph.D. candidate at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, is working to revise the methods scientists use to date […]