Geometry and reaction variables. Credit: Nature Chemical Engineering (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44286-024-00108-3 Hundreds of millions of tons of plastic waste are generated worldwide every year. Scientists are working tirelessly on new methods to recycle a large proportion of this waste into high-quality products and thus enable a genuine circular economy. However, current recycling practices fall short … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Imperial College London research has found limits to how quickly we can scale up technology to store gigatonnes of carbon dioxide under Earth’s surface. Current international scenarios for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees by the end of the century rely on technologies that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from … Read more
Thirty million years ago, the Neotropical leaf-nosed bat survived solely on insects. Since then, these bats have diversified into many different species by changing what they eat. Credit: Stowers Institute for Medical Research Humans must regulate blood sugar concentrations to stay healthy and to fuel our cells. Too little or too much can cause serious … Read more
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule sits on Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX on Tuesday postponed once more its attempt at launching a daring orbital expedition featuring an all-civilian crew that is aiming to carry out the first-ever spacewalk by private citizens. The Polaris Dawn mission, organized … Read more
South Asia remains the region with the world’s worst air pollution. A surprise improvement in air quality in South Asia in 2022 drove a decline in global pollution, with favorable weather a likely factor, a new report said Wednesday. But the region continues to breathe the world’s most-polluted air, with its residents losing more than … Read more
Visualization of situation around 3700 BCE. Credit: Magistrat der Stadt Hofheim; LEIZA-Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie, Architectura Virtualis 2020 www.leiza.de/kapellenberg Since the end of the last Ice Age, growth of the human population has been far from uniform, marked instead by periods of rapid expansion followed by sharp declines. The reasons behind these fluctuations remain only partially … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Teams from the University of Florida, Indiana University, and other universities across the U.S. and Israel recently conducted five eye-opening studies about rudeness, uncovering that even mild instances of this behavior can significantly impair employees’ performance. This could have potentially life-threatening consequences in critical fields like health care. The research is … Read more
Yash Sondhi went looking for differences in color vision between two closely related moths, one of which is active at night and the other during the day. Instead, he found differences in the way they kept time. Credit: Jeremy Squire How does one species become two? If you’re a biologist, that’s a loaded question. The … Read more
An upside-down sea ice slab showcasing brine channels that facilitate the drainage of liquid brine and support convection along the interface. Credit: Professor Ken Golden A new applied mathematical theory could enhance our understanding of how sea ice affects global climate, potentially improving the accuracy of climate predictions. The authors of a new paper published … Read more
A figure comparing the results of earlier turbidite correlation research to results calculated by an algorithm developed at The University of Texas at Austin. Black dashed lines indicate similar research results. Red dashed lines are different results. Credit: Zoltan Sylvester The Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest has a history of producing powerful and … Read more
