Many tropical countries are exceptionally vulnerable to changes in rainfall patterns, with floods or droughts often severely affecting human life and health, food and water supplies, ecosystems and infrastructure. There is widespread disagreement among climate model projections of how and where rainfall will change over tropical land at the regional scales relevant to impacts, with different models predicting the position of current tropical wet and dry regions to shift in different ways.

Soil fungi have pivotal ecological roles as decomposers, pathogens and symbionts. Alterations to their diversity arising from climate change could have substantial effects on ecosystems, particularly those undergoing rapid warming that contain few species. Here, we report a study using pyrosequencing to assess fungal diversity in 29 soils sampled from a 1,650 km climatic gradient through the maritime Antarctic, the most rapidly warming region in the Southern Hemisphere.

This Executive Summary to the Endocrine Society’s second Scientific Statement on environmental endocrinedisrupting chemicals (EDCs) provides a synthesis of the key points of the complete statement. The full Scientific Statement represents a comprehensive review of the literature on seven topics for which there is strong mechanistic, experimental, animal, and epidemiological evidence for endocrine disruption, namely: obesity and diabetes, female reproduction, male reproduction, hormone-sensitive cancers in females, prostate cancer, thyroid, and neurodevelopment and neuroendocrine systems.

For tens of millions of years, cold conditions have excluded shell-crushing fish and crustaceans from the continental shelf surrounding Antarctica. Rapid warming is now allowing predatory crustaceans to return. Our study of the continental slope off the western Antarctic Peninsula showed that abundant, predatory king crabs comprise a reproductively viable population at 841- to 2,266-m depth.

Earlier in the past century, infections were regarded as the most likely cause of childhood B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (pB-ALL). However, there is a lack of relevant biological evidence supporting this hypothesis. We present in vivo genetic evidence mechanistically connecting inherited susceptibility to pB-ALL and postnatal infections by showing that pB-ALL was initiated in Pax5 heterozygous mice only when they were exposed to common pathogens. Strikingly, these murine pB-ALLs closely resemble the human disease.

Many boreal waters are currently becoming browner with effects on biodiversity, fish production, biogeochemical processes and drinking water quality. The question arises whether and at which speed this browning will continue under future climate change. To answer the question we predicted the absorbance (a420) in 6347 lakes and streams of the boreal region under future climate change. For the prediction we modified a numerical model for a420 spatial variation which we tested on a temporal scale by simulating a420 inter-annual variation in 48 out of the 6347 Swedish waters.

Global mean sea levels are projected to gradually rise in response to greenhouse warming. However, on shorter time scales, modes of natural climate variability in the Pacific, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), can affect regional sea level variability and extremes, with considerable impacts on coastal ecosystems and island nations. How these shorter-term sea level fluctuations will change in association with a projected increase in extreme El Niño and its atmospheric variability remains unknown.

The 2014–2015 Bárðarbunga-Veiðivötn fissure eruption at Holuhraun produced about 1.5 km3 of lava, making it the largest eruption in Iceland in more than 200 years. Over the course of the eruption, daily volcanic sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions exceeded daily SO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources in Europe in 2010 by at least a factor of 3. We present surface air quality observations from across Northern Europe together with satellite remote sensing data and model simulations of volcanic SO2 for September 2014.

Ecological partnerships, or mutualisms, are globally widespread, sustaining agriculture and biodiversity. Mutualisms evolve through the matching of functional traits between partners, such as tongue length of pollinators and flower tube depth of plants. Long-tongued pollinators specialize on flowers with deep corolla tubes, whereas shorter-tongued pollinators generalize across tube lengths. Losses of functional guilds because of shifts in global climate may disrupt mutualisms and threaten partner species.

In the quest for planetary exploration, Mars holds a special position in view of the many similarities it has with Earth. This article highlights the significant aspects of the concept design and planning which paved the way for the successful Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM). Lessons learnt from historical failures of Mars missions are summarized. The main driving factors of the MOM design are reliability, optimal utilization of existing launch systems, and minimum energy orbit placement around Mars with an innovative, highly elliptic orbit.