University Park, PA -- On Saturday, March 28, at 8:30 p.m., Penn State's University Park campus will join in the global effort known as "Earth Hour" by turning off the exterior lights of Old Main, as well as lights elsewhere on campus.

Temperature is an important factor in the spread of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, but researchers who look at average monthly or annual temperatures are not seeing the whole picture. Global climate change will affect daily temperature variations, which can have a more pronounced effect on parasite development, according to a Penn State entomologist."We need higher resolution environmental and biological data to understand how climate change will affect the spread of the malaria parasite," says Matthew Thomas, professor of entomology. We need to understand temperature from the point of view of the mosquito."

Global warming, increasing greenhouse gases and melting ice sheets are among the predictions made by the Nobel-Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but comprehending the scientific assessments, their human impacts, and the possibilities for mitigation is not easy. Now, in a new book, Penn State climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump digest the most recent IPCC reports into easily understood, sometimes amusing explanations and illustrations. "Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming" features all the graphs, images and eye-catching layout expected from international publisher DK Publishing, which specializes in popular illustrated reference books such as "The Way the Universe Works."

For just one late-summer night each year, the shallow waters off the coast of Puerto Rico fill with the pale-pink spawn of elkhorn corals -- the tiny, round packets of the adult corals' eggs and sperm. This year, Iliana Baums, assistant professor of biology at Penn State, is there to collect the coral spawn as part of a research and education project to grow the newborn juvenile corals for distribution to aquariums and to the wild. "It looks like it's snowing," she said, "except that the egg and sperm packets rise underwater to the surface rather than fall to the ground."

Schoolkids know that over 70 percent of Earth's surface is washed in water. Yet very little of that abundance—less than two percent—is available for drinking and agriculture. Over the last 50 years, moreover, freshwater use has tripled as global population has doubled, leading to scarcities in many regions of the globe. According to the United Nations, over 1.1 billion of the world's people lack access to a clean water supply.

Fewer caribou calves are being born and more of them are dying in West Greenland as a result of a warming climate, according to Eric Post, a Penn State associate professor of biology. Post, who believes that caribou may serve as an indicator species for climate changes including global warming, based his conclusions on data showing that the timing of peak food availability no longer corresponds to the timing of caribou births. The study, which was conducted in collaboration with Mads Forchhammer at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, will be published in the July 12 issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.