Climate campaigners will increasingly adopt "insider activist" roles, working to change or challenge their organizations from the inside rather than the outside, a new study says.

Research led by the University of Exeter identifies different types of climate activists. As well as "insiders," there are others who seek to undermine, or even damage, climate-recalcitrant organizations they are members of in the hope of change.

The study says the growing climate backlash against traditional outside climate activism and the rise of corporate "greenwashing" means collaborating or contesting for meaningful climate action from the inside of organizations is going to become an important new venue for climate activism.

Insider activists often team up to work with others in different areas of their organization or other groups.

An international team of researchers led by Dr. Mungo Frost from the SLAC research center in California has gained new insights into the formation of diamond rain on icy planets such as Neptune and Uranus, using the X-ray laser European XFEL in Schenefeld. The results also provide clues to the formation of the complex magnetic fields of these planets.

In earlier work on X-ray lasers, scientists discovered that diamonds should form from carbon compounds in the interior of the large gas planets because of the high pressure prevailing there. These would then sink further into the interior of the planets as a rain of precious stones from the higher layers.

A new experiment at the European XFEL has now shown that the formation of diamonds from carbon compounds already starts at lower pressures and temperatures than assumed. For the gas planets, this means that diamond rain already forms at a lower depth than thought, and could thus have a stronger influence on the formation of the magnetic fields.

In addition, diamond rain would also be possible on gas planets that are smaller than Neptune and Uranus and are called "mini-Neptunes." Such planets do not exist in our solar system, but they do occur as exoplanets outside of it.

The origin of Earth and the solar system inspires scientists and the public alike. By studying the present state of our home planet and other objects in the solar system, researchers have developed a detailed picture of the conditions when they evolved from a disk made of dust and gas surrounding the infant sun some 4.5 billion years ago.

With the breathtaking progress made in star and planet formation research aiming at far-away celestial objects, we can now investigate the conditions in environments around young stars and compare them to the ones derived for the early solar system. Using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), an international team of researchers led by József Varga from the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, Hungary, did just that. They observed the planet-forming disk of the young star HD 144432, approximately 500 light-years away.

"When studying the dust distribution in the disk's innermost region, we detected for the first time a complex structure in which dust piles up in three concentric rings in such an environment," says Roy van Boekel. He is a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, and a co-author of the underlying research article to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A paper published in Nature Communications Biology contributes to the growing appreciation for the outsize role that microbes play in everything from human digestion to crop yields: Microbes in the soil—fungi in this case—appear to be influencing forest diversity on a global scale.

Forests on Earth exhibit a marked gradient from the equator toward the poles: Tropical forests near the equator tend to include a large number of different species, whereas forests nearer the poles support less plant diversity.

One explanation for this phenomenon maintains that soil pathogens, including bacteria and fungi, help create this gradient. Species-specific pathogens accumulate near adult trees, and their abundance can diminish the success of juveniles growing near their parents, thus promoting species diversity. This effect is stronger in warm, wet climates, contributing to the greater diversity in forests near the equator.

However, a new study led by Camille Delavaux, a lead scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, adds a twist to this established story. Mycorrhizal fungi—soil fungi that form mutually beneficial relationships with the majority of plant roots globally—appear to be counteracting the effects of harmful soil pathogens in ways that influence global patterns of forest diversity.

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Searching for liquid water on exoplanets is the key to finding life among the stars, and now, scientists have proposed a new strategy that might improve the chances of finding it.

In the new study, published Dec. 28 in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers hypothesized that if the atmosphere of an exoplanet has less CO2 than its neighbors, there may be vast quantities of water on its surface — or even life.

Anoxia threatens inland waters worldwide. Once it has occurred in a lake, the lack of oxygen even sets in motion a downward spiral that accelerates with increasing global warming. This is indicated by the results of an international study involving researchers of TU Bergakademie Freiberg, which were published in Global Change Biology.

According to the study, lakes that were once affected by a lack of oxygen in deep water are affected again the following year. As a result, the living conditions for fish and invertebrates continue to deteriorate, greenhouse gases are increasingly released and nutrient cycles are intensified.

Coastal forests in Japan had predominantly been afforested with black pine (Pinus thunbergii), a shade-tolerant tree species that can withstand dry land ecosystems and harsh coastal environments.

This afforestation initiative, dating back to the Edo period (1603~1867), aimed to mitigate the deleterious effects of robust winds and sand blowing. Subsequent to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, interest shifted to the potential protective effects of coastal forests in reducing the destructive power of tsunamis.

The Great East Japan Earthquake tsunami damaged a total of 2,800 hectares of coastal forest. While the damage was immense, the devastation provided an opportunity to study which coastal forests withstood the tsunami impact and why some forests fared better than others.

The chair of NatWest has claimed it is not “that difficult” to get on the property ladder, despite the number of first-time buyers with a mortgage falling to the lowest level in a decade.

“I don’t think it is that difficult at the moment,” Sir Howard Davies told the BBC.

Pressed about this assertion, he added: “You have to save, and that is the way it always used to be.”

His comments to Radio 4’s Today programme follow a report published earlier this week by Yorkshire Building Society, which found that the number of first-time buyers who bought a home with a mortgage fell to the lowest level in a decade in 2023.