Which species may be most adept to climate change? The answer could very well be microbes. The microscopic critters do something that no other living thing is capable of: long term dormancy. As Jay Lennon from Michigan State University explains in his latest paper, “Microbial seed banks: the ecological and evolutionary implications of dormancy” in Nature Reviews: Microbiology, when the going gets rough, microbes can just check out and wait for better times. “There’s this transition... [Read more]

The journal Science has devoted an entire issue to exploring the way the oceans are rapidly transforming in response to climate change and other factors. It’s worth taking a peek into this extensive sweep of research; the oceans, after all, account for 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and are the least explored part of the globe. I’ll be looking at a number of the papers published in the issue largely because of the growing sense I’ve felt from an accumulation of news stories... [Read more]