Health & Science

Species flee climate change

Animals and plants are moving rapidly away from the equator to escape global warming’s rising temperatures. A new study of more than 2,000 species shows that they’re headed toward the poles at an average rate of a mile per year—about three times faster than scientists previously predicted. They’re also migrating uphill to cooler elevations, at a rate of about 4 feet per year. The findings, study co-author Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas tells the Associated Press, are “independent confirmation that the climate is changing.’’ The last decade was the hottest ever recorded. In the U.S., bark beetles are thriving in warmer Rocky Mountain temperatures, devastating pine forests there, and they’re headed north to the dense forests of Canada. Mosquitoes carrying dengue fever have moved from the tropics into Key West, Fla. The egret now thrives in Great Britain, which it used to find too cold, while species of butterflies and spiders are showing up hundreds of miles north of their previous habitats. “If you look in your garden,’’ says study co-author Chris Thomas of the University of York, “you can see the effects of climate change already.’’

The first life on Earth?

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Geologists say they’ve discovered the oldest life-forms yet: fossil microbes that are 3.4 billion years old. The bacteria lived at a time when the Earth—then only about a billion years old—was boiling hot and lacked any breathable oxygen. The organisms appear to have survived by eating sulfur, much the way bacteria that live in deep-sea hydrothermal vents do today. Researchers uncovered the fossils in Western Australia and analyzed them using state-of-the-art techniques. Unlike previous finds, which turned out to be mineral deposits, the new microscopic fossils show key signs of life: uniformly shaped cell walls that contain chemicals indicating a sulfur-based diet, and potential by-products, in the form of pyrite, nearby. The cells also appear in clusters that suggest they were dividing to produce more bacteria. “They’re certainly the best-documented, most convincing examples we have” of Earth’s first life-forms, Mike Tice, a geobiologist at Texas A&M University, tells The Washington Post. The fossils will help scientists understand how life originated on our planet, and point to the possibility that similar organisms might be found in the harsh conditions on Mars or other planets and moons in our solar system.

Why the whole East Coast shook

People as far south as Atlanta and as far north as Toronto felt the ground undulate and shudder during the 5.8 magnitude earthquake centered in Virginia last week. It was felt in New York City and in Boston, and even on offshore islands like Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. That’s a lot of shaking for a medium-size quake, but “seismic waves travel much farther in the east than in the west,” U.S. Geological Survey geologist David Schwartz tells LiveScience.com. In the east, the Earth’s crust is older, harder, and more dense, with fewer cracks and faults to absorb shaking. When a quake strikes, the bedrock reverberates “like a solid bell” rather than muting the impact, as softer, West Coast sediments do, scientists say. As a result, East Coast quakes are felt as much as 10 times farther away than quakes are in California. Quakes are much rarer and generally milder in the east; unlike California, the east isn’t situated along a major fault line between the plates that make up the Earth’s crust. Still, interplate tension does sometimes trigger quakes along the many smaller faults in the eastern bedrock. Virginia had a 5.8 quake in 1897, and in 1886, a quake estimated at 7.0 damaged thousands of buildings in Charleston, S.C.

California’s giant rodent

For years, Californians have reported Bigfoot-like sightings of a 100-plus-pound rodent near Paso Robles. Now photos snapped by a sanitation worker with his cell phone prove that the creature isn’t imaginary—it’s a capybara, the world’s largest rodent. Capybaras are native to South American lakes, swamps, and marshes, and resemble giant guinea pigs. Officials think the Paso Robles rodent, which seems to live around the pond at a wastewater treatment plant there, was kept illegally as a pet before it “either got away or people couldn’t deal with it anymore” and set it free, California Department of Fish and Game spokesman Andrew Hughan tells the Los Angeles Times. Despite its large size, Hughan says, the plant-eating creature isn’t dangerous, “just weird looking.” But he warns people to give it a wide berth. “Like any wild animal, they’re going to defend themselves” if they feel provoked, he says.