AGU's Eos

2 weeks ago | eos.org | Katherine Kornei

On a summer day not long ago, 10 people gathered to eat cheese in the name of science. They nibbled on small rounds of Cantal, a firm cow’s milk cheese historically produced in south central France, and evaluated more than 25 attributes spanning color, odor, taste, aroma, and texture. The tasting was just one component of a larger study on the effects of shifting cows’ diets from grass to corn because of industrialization and climate change.

2 weeks ago | eos.org | Saima May Sidik

Soil moisture is a key regulator of temperature and humidity, one that’s positioned to be affected substantially by climate change. But despite the importance of soil moisture, efforts to model it involve dozens of poorly constrained parameters, and different models tend to disagree about how soil moisture levels will change in a warming world.

2 weeks ago | eos.org | Katherine Kornei

Frank Marks remembers the Diet Coke can floating in front of his face as the plane pitched violently. After several attempts to grab it, he gave up and focused on avoiding the other debris ricocheting around the cabin. Then an engine flamed out, and the pilots dumped 15,000 pounds (6,800 kilograms) of fuel in a last-ditch effort to climb to relative safety without overheating the three working engines. The flight miraculously landed safely in Barbados a few hours later.

2 weeks ago | eos.org | Emily Dieckman

Officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Tuesday that only adults older than 65 and people with specific medical conditions will be considered eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations this fall. Healthy Americans younger than 65 may be eligible for vaccine boosters depending on the outcomes of new clinical trials.

2 weeks ago | eos.org | Syris Valentine

For decades, wounds have surfaced in the Peruvian Amazon where the Rio Inambari merges with the Rio Madre de Dios, carving thick gashes into ancient tree stands. These almost lunar scars of barren rubble were formed at the hands of a growing enterprise capitalizing on gold that the rivers deposit throughout their floodplains. A new study published in Environmental Research Letters shows that the spread of this devastation has quickened and increasingly affected a unique Amazonian ecosystem.