Here’s a term that will soon become a household word: I’m talking about diatoms. Many gardeners are familiar with D.E., or diatomaceous earth, because it can be used to control insects in the garden ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: The biggest landslides on Earth aren't on land, but on the seafloor. These mega-slides can move thousands of cubic kilometers of material, and sometimes trigger tsunamis. Yet, ...

Diatoms — tiny phytoplankton that are responsible for a fifth of all energy converted into matter by plants — may have become important much earlier in the development of Earth’s ocean ecosystems and ...

Diatoms – unicellular organisms – have long been known to science, but their overwhelming appetite for nitrate is a new discovery made in a global survey. Nitrate is a nutrient, widely used as ...

A simple single-celled marine organism, known as a diatom, has an enormous impact on our atmosphere and oceans, and without these chlorophyll- producing organisms classified as phytoplankton, life as ...

Hidden within Arctic ice, diatoms are proving to be anything but dormant. New Stanford research shows these glass-walled algae glide through frozen channels at record-breaking subzero temperatures, ...

This post is the first in a three-part series on how living creatures use the elements of the periodic table. Learn more about the elements on NOVA's two-hour special, "Hunting The Elements." When you ...

A new study has revealed how the glass-like shells of diatoms help these microscopic organisms perform photosynthesis in dim conditions. A better understanding of how these phytoplankton harvest and ...