Beavers could engineer riverbeds into promising carbon dioxide sinks, according to a new international study led by researchers at the University of Birmingham. The paper, published in Communications Earth & Environment, has for the first time calculated the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted and sequestered due to engineering work done by beavers in suitable wetland areas. [...]
Researchers at the University of Konstanz have uncovered a new mechanism of sliding friction: resistance to motion that arises without any mechanical contact, driven purely by collective magnetic dynamics. The study, published in Nature Materials, shows that friction does not necessarily increase steadily with load, as postulated by Amontons' law—one of the oldest and most fundamental empirical laws of physics—but can instead exhibit a pronounced maximum when internal magnetic ordering becomes frustrated. [...]
For more than a century, heparin has been the go-to anticoagulant to prevent harmful blood clots in blood vessels or the heart from forming or getting larger. However, a major side effect is an increased risk of excessive bleeding, even from minor injuries like small cuts on the skin. In ACS Central Science, researchers report the discovery of a snail-derived compound that blocks clot formation while still preserving bleeding control in mouse models. [...]
A resurgence of illegal fishing in northern Australian waters is a cause for environmental, biosecurity and social concern, and new research suggests the causes of this activity are increasingly complex. The project was conducted by an international team of researchers from Charles Darwin University (CDU) and Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency, and Nusa Cendana University. [...]
Quantum communication systems are emerging solutions to transmit information between devices in a network leveraging quantum mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement. Entanglement is a quantum effect that entails a link between two or more particles that share a unified state even at a distance, so that measuring one instantly affects the other. [...]
An international collaboration, including Northwestern University, has reached a critical milestone in the search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe. Located two kilometers below ground in Canada, the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) at SNOLAB has cooled to its operating temperature, the collaboration announced on March 17. [...]
A new study from the University of British Columbia has found that artificial turf fields across Metro Vancouver leach 6PPD-quinone, a chemical known to kill coho salmon, into municipal stormwater systems—and the contamination persists long after the fields are installed. [...]
Green investors often boast that they can support sustainability without sacrificing returns. But new research from Texas McCombs suggests otherwise. It also offers governments opportunities to raise more money from those investors for sustainable projects. The work is published in the Journal of Financial Economics. [...]
Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a new type of lipid nanoparticle (LNP) that could one day serve as a universal immunotherapy for cancers that form solid tumors, including common variants such as cancers of the breast, liver, and colon. [...]
Proteins, one of the smallest building blocks of life on Earth, hold promise for answering some of biology's biggest questions. Consisting of amino acids strung together into peptide chains, these molecules perform much of the work inside living cells. While they execute life's most essential functions with apparent ease, decoding their precise sequence and structure has long been one of biology's hardest challenges. [...]
Plastic trash has reached the world's most remote locations, from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest. Hundreds of plastic-eating microbes that could help us clean up have been discovered over the past quarter of a century, but there is a long way to go before they can be put to work in natural environments: Microbial digestion of plastic is still slow, requires high temperatures, and only proceeds efficiently in bioreactors. Moreover, most plastic-eating microbes discovered so far can only digest a single kind of plastic. [...]
ORNL is a leader both in developing advanced radiotherapies and in providing the radioisotopes needed for those therapies. According to Karen Sikes, director of the National Isotope Development Center, the lab is home to more than 300 isotopes that are available to researchers and others. Besides actinium-225, medical radioisotopes on the list include lead-212, an in vivo alpha emitter generator going through clinical trials for the treatment of liver, prostate, skin and other cancers, and actinium-227, which decays to the alpha emitter radium-223, found in the approved drug Xofigo used to treat prostate cancers that have spread to bone. [...]
Dallas-Fort Worth has all the right ingredients to be a national powerhouse for innovation—from a robust economy, world-class research universities to a diverse, dynamic workforce—yet an SMU-led study found the region isn't fully realizing that potential. The study, published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, found that DFW's innovation productivity is lower than expected based on its assets and strengths. The metroplex was one of 65 U.S. regions measured in patent activity after adjusting for income, education, unemployment, and startup activity. [...]
Climate change, population growth, conflict and humanitarian crises are putting increasing pressure on the world's water resources. That is why Norwegian researchers are looking into whether atmospheric water generators can become part of the solution. This type of water generator extracts moisture from the air using moisture-absorbing materials and converts it into drinking water. But they need to become more efficient. [...]
The South China Sea (SCS), a vital marine region supporting rich biodiversity, productive fisheries, and extensive coral reefs, faces growing threats from marine heat waves (MHWs). While surface MHWs have drawn attention, subsurface events—intense warming below the ocean surface—during boreal winter have been less studied, yet they can disrupt deeper-dwelling species and ecosystem stability in this semi-enclosed sea. [...]
At Empa, an interdisciplinary research institute for materials science and technology within the ETH Domain, researchers are working on ways to kill harmful bacteria and viruses. In the Nanomaterials in Health Lab, headed by Peter Wick, scientists are studying how highly specialized materials interact with the human body, the health risks they pose and their potential to tackle a variety of medical issues. [...]
If your great-grandparents ever saw "The Scream," they probably experienced a slightly different painting than the one we see today. Edvard Munch used materials that make his paintings vulnerable to the ravages of time. A new digital tool now shows how much "The Scream" may change over the next 300 years. [...]
Natural fibers promoted as sustainable alternatives to plastic, including cotton and wool, have been found preserved in a U.K. lake for more than a century—challenging assumptions that they quickly biodegrade in the environment. For the study, researchers from Keele University and Loughborough University recovered textile fibers from a 150-year sediment record from Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire. Lying less than three miles from the historic mill town of Leek, once a center of the country's textile industry, Rudyard Lake sits downstream of a significant site of industrial-era manufacturing activity. [...]
Scientists have developed a new material that can use sunlight and water to convert carbon dioxide (CO₂) into carbon monoxide (CO)—a key building block for making fuels, plastics, pharmaceuticals and other everyday chemicals. The finding could support the development of future technologies that recycle greenhouse gases to make fuels and useful chemicals more sustainably, using nothing more than light and water. [...]
Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges in the present times. Increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere are a major factor contributing to this phenomenon. Activities such as the burning of fossil fuels for daily use, like electricity and transportation, and industrial applications, release significant amounts of CO2, trapping the heat at excessive levels and contributing to global warming. [...]
Today, most of the salmon consumed in Japan is imported from countries like Chile and Norway, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. But just two decades ago, Japanese chum salmon made up a much larger share of domestic salmon consumption. Their numbers have declined sharply in recent years, and new research from Hokkaido University suggests that this decline may be linked to the loss of their natural habitats along their migratory routes. [...]
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have created a new and unusual state of matter—known as a supersolid—by engineering how light and matter interact inside a nanoscale device. The work, published in Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrates that this exotic quantum phase can exist at room temperature, overcoming a long-standing limitation in the field. [...]
The cactus on your windowsill may grow slowly, but new research shows that cacti are surprisingly fast at creating new species. Biologists have long thought that pollinators and specialized flowers drive the formation of new plant species. But scientists at the University of Reading have found that in cacti, the secret lies in how quickly flowers change shape, rather than how big the flowers grow or which animal pollinates them. [...]
Inside a diseased cell, the genes are in chaos. Some are receiving signals to overproduce a protein. Others are reducing activity to abnormal levels. Up is down and down is up. The right molecule could restore order, reversing dysregulation in specific genes. But finding the ideal compound could require examining millions of chemicals for their influence on hundreds or thousands of genes. [...]
An interdisciplinary team of authors from Canada, Austria, the U.S. and Germany has outlined how immuno-epidemiology and individual decision-making on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) can be understood jointly in the future—and which data are still missing—in a perspective article published in the journal Trends in Microbiology. [...]
Birds play a larger role in the dispersal of wild cotton than previously assumed. This is shown by a study in the journal Oikos, carried out in southern Africa. Researchers discovered that birds actively collect wild cotton as nesting material and in doing so move seeds over distances of more than a kilometer. Cotton fibers were long seen as something that evolved to disperse seeds by wind, but birds also take them to their nests and in this way help disperse the seeds much further. [...]
Fashion insiders and beauty magazines have long cited the "20-year-rule"—the idea that clothing trends often resurface every two decades. According to Northwestern University scientists, that observation isn't just anecdotal. It's a mathematical reality. [...]
Piezoelectric materials, which convert mechanical stress into electricity and vice versa, are essential components in sensors, actuators, and energy-harvesting devices. However, the best piezoelectric materials, such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT), are toxic because they contain lead—prompting a search for lead-free alternatives. [...]
Going to the grocery store these days can be a painful experience, with record-high price hikes biting into Canadian food budgets. However, as many societies around the world already know, a cheap, plentiful source of protein is literally at our feet: insects, especially crickets, grasshoppers, ants and beetles. While entomophagy—the eating of insects—has lagged in the U.S. and Canada, a new study by Concordia researchers has found that there is some interest in the dietary practice, with some demographic groups showing more openness than others. The paper is published in Scientific Reports. [...]
A unique collection of prehistoric bowhead whale bones, dating back 11,000 years, reveals a previously untold story of the relative impacts of humans on nature. The time series of ancient fossils show that commercial hunting of bowhead whales, which spanned 400 years and ceased less than a century ago in 1931, has left irreversible destructive traces in the species' genetics. This could have serious consequences for the long-term vulnerability of the species. [...]