Compelling evidence of the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deep-sea corals will be published online in the Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week beginning March 26. The diverse team of researchers, led by Penn State Professor of Biology Charles Fisher, used a wide range of underwater vehicles, including the research submarine Alvin, to investigate the corals. They also used comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography to determine precisely the source of the petroleum hydrocarbons they found.

Shoppers will continue to see the Fresh Local Produce sign in supermarkets, but stores will increasingly require growers to show proof of good agricultural practices, according to Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences researchers. Good agricultural practices -- GAPs -- are food-safety standards that reduce the risk of on-farm produce contamination, according to Daniel Tobin, a doctoral candidate in Agricultural and Extension Education and the principal investigator in the study.

Natural-gas development appears to be associated with falling dairy production in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region, but the exact reasons for the decline are unclear, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Over-reliance on glyphosate-type herbicides for weed control on U.S. farms has created a dramatic increase in the number of genetically-resistant weeds, according to a team of agricultural researchers, who say the solution lies in an integrated weed management program. "I'm deeply concerned when I see figures that herbicide use could double in the next decade," said David Mortensen, professor of weed ecology at Penn State. Since the mid-1990s, agricultural seed companies developed and marketed seeds that were genetically modified to resist herbicides such as Roundup -- glyphosate -- as a more flexible way to manage weeds, Mortensen said. About 95 percent of the current soybean crop is modified by inserting herbicide-resistant genes into the plants.

The bottom of a glacier is not the most hospitable place on Earth, but at least two types of bacteria happily live there, according to researchers. The bacteria -- Chryseobacterium and Paenisporosarcina -- showed signs of respiration in ice made in the laboratory that was designed to simulate as closely as possible the temperatures and nutrient content found at the bottom of Arctic and Antarctic glaciers, said Corien Bakermans, assistant professor of microbiology, Penn State Altoona. She said that carbon dioxide levels in the laboratory-made ice containing the bacteria, which were collected from glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, indicated that respiration was occurring at temperatures ranging from negative 27 to positive 24 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you’ve ever enjoyed the sight of a field of flowering purple loosestrife, cease and desist immediately. You are siding with a foreign enemy. While it may be pretty to gaze upon, the highly invasive Lythrum salicaria is on the National Park Service’s “Least Wanted” list for ruthlessly choking out indigenous grasses, sedges and flowering plants that are crucial sources of nutrition and habitat for wildlife in American wetlands.

This past summer, a group of 38 students and faculty from Penn State and Jiagnan University journeyed to Lake Taihu in Wuxi, China, as part of a united research effort to study the country's third largest freshwater lake. The experience was part of a course co-taught by Rachel Brennan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at University Park, and Jacqueline McLaughlin, associate professor of biology at Penn State Lehigh Valley.

The appearance of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere probably did not occur as a single event, but as a long series of starts and stops, according to an international team of researchers who investigated rock cores from the FAR DEEP project.

The Fennoscandia Arctic Russia - Drilling Early Earth Project (FAR DEEP) took place during the summer of 2007 near Murmansk in the northwest region of Russia. The project, part of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, drilled a series of shallow, two-inch diameter cores and, by overlapping them, created a record representing stone deposited during the Proterozoic Eon -- 2,500 million to 542 million years ago.