Feature Channels: Environmental Science

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Producing and selling seaweed could boost incomes for farmers in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in coastal regions of Africa and Southeast Asia, according to a new paper in Global Food Security.

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Tightly curled scalp hair protected early humans from the sun’s radiative heat, allowing their brains to grow to sizes comparable to those of modern humans. Loughborough University researchers in the UK worked with Penn State University to study heat transfer through human hair wigs and the environment to examine how diverse hair textures affect heat gain from solar radiation.

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Four indigenous writers will participate in a new residency program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF), one of the nation’s premier colleges focused exclusively on the study of the environment, developing renewable technologies, and building a sustainable future. Through the Indigenous Writer Residency Program, each writer will spend three weeks at Cranberry Lake Biological Station, ESF’s satellite campus nestled in the heart of the Adirondack Park on the ancestral lands of the Mohawk Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

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Plant biologist James O’Dwyer and graduate student Kenneth Jops report in Nature the development of a method that reliably predicts the complementary life histories of pairs of plants that manage to thrive while competing for many of the same resources.

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The Kogod School of Business at American University announced today it has received the Page Grand Prize, which recognizes excellence in sustainable business education.

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With human-induced greenhouse gases fueling global climate change, there is an urgent need to bolster emissions reductions with large-scale carbon dioxide removal.

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Dreams have been considered a hallmark of human sleep for a long time. Latest findings, however, suggest that when pigeons sleep, they might experience visions of flight. Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence studied brain activation patterns in sleeping pigeons, using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

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Especially after the last few COVID-affected years, nobody doubts that emerging infectious diseases can threaten the whole world. But humans are not the only ones at risk! With intensive global trade, many tree parasites are accidently introduced to Europe in packaging or directly on goods. Traveling in the wood, on plants or in the soil of their pots, they can remain undetected for a long time.

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A team of experimental neurobiologists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and theoretical biologists at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin has managed to solve a mystery that has been baffling scientists for decades. They have been able to determine the nature of the electrical activity in the nervous system of insects that controls their flight. In a paper recently published in Nature, they report on a previously unknown function of electrical synapses employed by fruit flies during flight.

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Shallow lakes and ponds emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but emissions from these systems vary considerably and are not well understood.

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Animals can defend themselves against their natural enemies in various ways. Well-defended species often share conspicuous body colors with other well-defended or undefended species, forming mimetic interactions.

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Several animal species display brood care, a phenomenon where ‘caring’ parents provide their offspring with food and protection against predators.

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New work led by Carnegie’s Phillip Cleves uses cutting-edge CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing tools to reveal a gene that’s critical to stony corals’ ability to build their reef architectures.

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Developing nations need greater visibility, acknowledgement and support for their research into the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), according to the authors of a major analysis of the past 15 years of worldwide research into SDGs.

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Defense of the United States is an undertaking that requires the help of experts from a wide array of obviously related disciplines — physics, engineering, computer science, political science and more. One discipline that might not immediately come to mind is plant ecophysiology. But the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Tala Awada is leading the way.

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Do whales increase the removal of carbon from the atmosphere? Despite some hope that this would be the case, a new study led by Griffith University and a team of global researchers has found the amount of potential carbon capture by whales is too little to meaningfully alter the course of climate change.

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Human influences have the potential to reduce the effectivity of communication in bees adding further stress to struggling colonies, according to new analysis.

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Night-time pollinators such as moths may visit just as many plants as bees, and should also be the focus of conservation and protection efforts, a new study from the University of Sheffield suggests.

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An innovative and sustainable chemistry developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory for capturing carbon dioxide from air has been licensed to Holocene, a Knoxville-based startup focused on designing and building plants that remove carbon dioxide from atmospheric air.

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Microbes are by far the most important factor in determining how much carbon is stored in the soil, according to a new study with implications for mitigating climate change and improving soil health for agriculture and food production.

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A recent study led by a researcher at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University found that the likelihood of extreme temperatures that could affect crop yields has increased significantly in wheat-producing regions of the U.S. and China.

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University of Cambridge architects are inviting visitors to the London Design Biennale to experience a prototype home constructed with flexible wooden partition walls which can be shifted to meet the changing needs of residents.

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Plastic made from cane sugar also threatens the environment. Researchers from the University of Gothenburg have found that perch change their behaviour when exposed to so-called bioplastic.

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For the first time ever, scientists have uncovered evidence that a species’ long-term adaptation to living in an extremely cold climate has led to the evolution of social behaviours including extended care by mothers, increased infant survival and the ability to live in large complex multilevel societies.

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The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, today announced the launch of the Berkeley Haas Sustainable Business Research Prize. The prize encourages serious research with timely, real-world business-practice applications among business school faculty around the world related to responsible business, sustainability, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues.

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When firms make their environmental policies public, they can get favorable media coverage only if their narrative carefully articulates signals of conformity (actions aimed at complying with existing norms) and distinctiveness (the adoption of a recognizably uncommon behavior).

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Corn growers seeking to increase the amount of nitrogen taken up by their crop can adjust many aspects of fertilizer application, but recent studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign show those tweaks don’t do much to improve uptake efficiency from fertilizer. That’s because, the studies show, corn takes up the majority of its nitrogen – about 67% on average – from sources occurring naturally in soil, not from fertilizer.

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Malia Gehan, PhD, assistant member, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, was selected to be part of the Taylor Geospatial Institute’s inaugural class of TGI Fellows.  The program enables TGI member institutions to recruit and retain distinguished researchers in geospatial science fields, develop the next generation of scientific leaders and catalyze collaboration to accelerate the region’s development as a global geospatial center of excellence.

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Plastics transformed engineering in the past century, but they also transformed the environment in ways that will take millennia to repair. Washington University in St. Louis is leading a new effort to address the grand challenge of developing the next generation of high-performance, sustainably sourced and biodegradable plastics that advance engineering while also protecting the environment.

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A team led by Argonne has developed a new catalyst composed of elements abundant in the Earth. It could make possible the low-cost and energy-efficient production of hydrogen for use in transportation and industrial applications.

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yale University are proposing a novel pathway through which coastal ecosystem restoration can permanently capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Seagrass and mangroves — known as blue carbon ecosystems — naturally capture carbon through photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide into living tissue.

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A detailed plan to transform product packaging and significantly cut plastic production and pollution has been developed by researchers.

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Insects use odor plumes — which travel like smoke and form when the wind blows odor molecules from their source — to track down sources such as flowers or pheromones. But wind tunnels are typically unable to replicate realistic outdoor wind conditions. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, University of Nevada at Reno researchers decided to explore microscale wind conditions in various outdoor environments to better understand what flying insects might experience while tracking odor plumes.

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Chula President pledged to move ahead with greenhouse gas reduction on the Chulalongkorn University campus targeting Net Zero Greenhouse Gas Emission by 2050 and unveiled 5 pilot strategies for minimizing carbon dioxide emissions and also achieving campus sustainability.

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Among the approximately 2,000 known species of termites, some are ecosystem engineers. The mounds built by some genera, for example Amitermes, Macrotermes, Nasutitermes, and Odontotermes, reach up to eight meters high, making them some of the world’s largest biological structures.