Environment
press releases.

Environment28 Mar 2024

UTA hosts Solar-bration watch party for April 8 eclipse

The University of Texas at Arlington is hosting an April 8 watch party that is open to the public so the community can join Maverick students, faculty and staff in viewing the first total solar eclipse visible in North Texas since 1878. The party will offer food trucks, an audio program featuring eclipse experts from UTA’s faculty, and more. Visit UTA’s Solar-bration website for details, including parking information. The event is sponsored in part by Whataburger. For visitors, UTA is offering a limited number of free eclipse glasses available for pickup at viewing locations across campus. If you wish to guarantee that you will have glasses, or you need more ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Your emotional reaction to climate change may impact the policies you support

Emotional reactions to climate change may lead to specific policy preferences, according to a study published March 27, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Teresa A. Myers of George Mason University and colleagues. A politician, public speaker, or journalist may opt for an emotional appeal when communicating about climate change. Indeed, research shows that emotional investment can raise awareness of important issues and galvanize an otherwise apathetic public. However, existing research has not explored the unique links between specific ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Europe’s forgotten forests could be 21st century ‘biodiversity hot spots’

An overlooked and long-neglected type of forest has vast capacity to rebound, enhancing species diversity and resilience to climate change, according to an international team of forest scientists. According to new research, published today in the peer-reviewed science journal PLOS ONE, there is ample habitat for the Eurasian aspen, and these environments will continue to be suitable for this “keystone species” as the global climate warms. “The Eurasian aspen, and aspen species globally, are home to vast populations of other dependent plants and animals,” said the study’s lead author, Antonin Kusbach, an applied ecologist at Mendel University in ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Land under water – what causes extreme flooding

There are several factors that play an important role in the development of floods: air temperature, soil moisture, snow depth, and the daily precipitation in the days before a flood. In order to better understand how individual factors contribute to flooding, UFZ researchers examined more than 3,500 river basins worldwide and analysed flood events between 1981 and 2020 for each of them. The result: precipitation was the sole determining factor in only around 25% of the almost 125,000 flood events. Soil moisture was the decisive factor in just over 10% of cases, and ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

WISPR team images turbulence within solar transients for the first time

WASHINGTON — The Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) Science Team, led by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), captured the development of turbulence as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) interacted with the ambient solar wind in the circumsolar space. This discovery is reported in the Astrophysical Journal. Taking advantage of its unique location inside the Sun’s atmosphere, the NRL-built WISPR telescope on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission, operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), captured in unparalleled detail the interaction between ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Newly uncovered history of a key ocean current carries a warning on climate

It carries more than 100 times as much water as all the world's rivers combined. It reaches from the ocean's surface to its bottom, and measures as much as 2,000 kilometers across. It connects the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and plays a key role in regulating global climate. Continuously swirling around the southernmost continent, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is by far the world's most powerful and consequential mover of water. In recent decades it has been speeding up, but scientists have been unsure whether ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets. An international research team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have now used sediments taken from the South Pacific to reconstruct the flow speed in the last 5.3 million years. Their data show that during glacial periods, the current slowed; during interglacials, it accelerated. Consequently, if ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Extreme heat and ozone pollution: A call for targeted control strategies in China

Elevated surface ozone concentrations in China are posing a significant threat to both human health and crop yields. Extreme heat can greatly exacerbate ozone pollution through both complex chemical and physical processes. For example, extreme heat is often accompanied by stagnant weather conditions, which can lead to the accumulation and subsequent elevation of ozone. Considering that extreme heat events have been becoming increasingly frequent in recent decades, and are also expected to do so on into the future, effective control strategies to reduce ozone pollution risks are urgently needed. Therefore, a research group led by Prof. Ke ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Heat, cold extremes hold untapped potential for solar and wind energy

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Conditions that usually accompany the kind of intense hot and cold weather that strains power grids may also provide greater opportunities to capture solar and wind energy. A Washington State University-led study found that widespread, extreme temperature events are often accompanied by greater solar radiation and higher wind speeds that could be captured by solar panels and wind turbines. The research, which looked at extensive heat and cold waves across the six interconnected energy grid regions of ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Global study of 34 countries: ocean protection delivers massive overlooked economic benefits to fishing, tourism

BARCELONA, SPAIN (27 MARCH 2024)—In the most comprehensive assessment of its kind to date, a new study released today reveals that marine protected areas (MPAs, national parks at sea) deliver a range of economic benefits to the fishing and tourism industries. The study examined more than 50 protected areas in more than 30 countries in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania representing diverse ecosystems to find that, in all cases, MPAs boosted either fishing or tourism, with some profits in the billions. “In every corner of the globe, ocean protection boosts economies,” said ...

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Environment27 Mar 2024

Advancing towards sustainability: turning carbon dioxide and water into acetylene

Reaching sustainability is one of humanity’s most pressing challenges today—and also one of the hardest. To minimize our impact on the environment and start reverting the damage humanity has already caused, striving to achieve carbon neutrality in as many economic activities as possible is paramount. Unfortunately, the synthesis of many important chemicals still causes high carbon emissions. Such is the case of acetylene (C2H2), an essential hydrocarbon with a plethora of applications. This highly ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

Curbside collection improves organic waste composting, reduces methane emissions

URBANA, Ill. – Most organic household waste ends up in landfills where it generates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Composting food and garden waste instead of sending it to landfills can significantly reduce methane emissions and help mitigate global warming. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explores the effects of curbside compost collection programs in New South Wales, Australia. “Governments around the world are interested in composting organic waste and reducing their methane emissions, and they are looking for ways to make ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

The behavior of ant queens is shaped by their social environment

The queens in colonies of social insects, such as ants, bees, and wasps, are considered the veritable embodiment of specialization in the animal kingdom. The common perception is that the queen's only task is to lay eggs – and that this attribute is an inherent trait, not influenced by external factors. In contrast, recent research undertaken at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has demonstrated that in certain ant colonies the social environment can play a crucial role in shaping the ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

Safe viewing of solar eclipses

On April 8, a total solar eclipse will pass over Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. This JAMA Patient Page describes solar eclipses and how to view them safely. END ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

ORIGAMI: anticipating the future of more connected, efficient and sustainable telecommunication infrastructures

The ORIGAMI (Optimized Resource Integration and Global Architecture for Mobile Infrastructure for 6G) project is now underway. The project, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe program, will spearhead architectural innovations for the next generation of 6G mobile networks, to enable innovative applications, new business models, and substantial reductions in energy consumption. By proposing and developing three critical architecture innovations – Global Services Based Architecture (GSBA), Zero Trust Exposure Layer (ZTL), and Continuous Compute ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

A global map of how climate change is changing winegrowing regions

Grapes grown to make wine are sensitive to climate conditions such as temperature and extreme drought. These effects are already visible worldwide on yields, the composition of grapes and the quality of wines, with already and soon-to-be-observed consequences on the geography of wine production. Understanding shifts in wine production potential due to climate change is a major scientific concern. Based on their expertise and a thorough analysis of the scientific literature — over 250 publications in the last 20 years – a research team has established a global map of evolving trends in the threats and potential benefits that climate change brings ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

Severe hurricanes boost influx of juveniles and gene flow in a coral reef sponge

Named for its ropy-looking long branches, Aplysina cauliformis, a coral reef sponge, provides a critical 3D habitat for marine organisms and helps to stabilize the foundation of coral reefs. However, these upright branching sponges are highly susceptible to breaking during storms, which increases sponge fragmentation and contributes to population clonality and inbreeding. Many sponges can survive severe damage and undergo frequent fragmentation, which is considered a mechanism for asexual reproduction. While fragmentation is a commonly utilized reproductive strategy in rope sponges, they also can reproduce sexually by producing larvae. How and whether they recolonize following ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

Virginia Tech study considers ways to increase accessibility for all wildlife enthusiasts

One in three birders experiences accessibility challenges to participation in birding, according to Virginia Tech researchers Emily Sinkular and Ashley Dayer. “I like to think of our research as blending together two previously unconnected fields: disability studies and wildlife recreation,” said Sinkular, a Ph.D. student and lead author of the study published March 26 in the journal Human Dimensions and Wildlife. “There’s been quite a lot of research on disability and lots of research on birding, but very few researchers have combined these two topics together.” The ...

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Environment26 Mar 2024

Research lights up process for turning CO2 into sustainable fuel

Researchers have successfully transformed CO2 into methanol by shining sunlight on single atoms of copper deposited on a light-activated material, a discovery that paves the way for creating new green fuels. An international team of researchers from the University of Nottingham's School of Chemistry, University of Birmingham, University of Queensland and University of Ulm have designed a material, made up of copper anchored on nanocrystalline carbon nitride. The copper atoms are nested ...

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Environment25 Mar 2024

Seeing the forest for the trees: Species diversity is directly correlated with productivity in eastern U.S. forests

When scientists and policymakers make tough calls on which areas to prioritize for conservation, biodiversity is often their top consideration. Environments with more diversity support a greater number of species and provide more ecosystem services, making them the obvious choice. There’s just one problem. There are several ways to measure diversity, and each reveals a slightly different, and sometimes conflicting, view of how life interacts in a forest or other ecosystem. In a new study published ...

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Environment25 Mar 2024

Citizen scientists contribute vital information about 35 seahorse species: their geographic ranges, habitats, and pregnancy seasonality

Thanks to diligent observers, seahorses, those enigmatic and charismatic fish, are not only being discovered in new habitats and expanded geographic ranges, they are also being found at new ocean depths. While their capacity for male pregnancy has long fascinated people, new information on sex ratio and pregnancy seasonality has been discovered by, well, you. Researchers from Project Seahorse – a marine conservation team based at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) – identified and reviewed new findings related to 35 of the 46 seahorse species found around the globe, ...

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Environment22 Mar 2024

New findings shed light on finding valuable ‘green’ metals

Research led by Macquarie University sheds new light on how concentrations of metals used in renewable energy technologies can be transported from deep within the Earth's interior mantle by low temperature, carbon-rich melts. The findings published this week in the journal Science Advances may assist global efforts to find these valuable raw materials. An international team led by Dr Isra Ezad, a postdoctoral research fellow from Macquarie University’s School of Natural Sciences, carried out high pressure ...

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Environment22 Mar 2024

Research uncovers a rare resin fossil find: A spider that aspires to be an ant

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Arachnophobia can make humans flee at the sight of a brown recluse, black widow or even a daddy long legs, but animal predators of spiders know no such fear. That’s why, paleobiologist George Poinar Jr. explains, some spider species have developed the defense of deception. They masquerade as a much less desirable prey – ants – and Poinar’s recent paper in Historical Biology presents an early record of an ant-mimicking spider in fossilized resin. “Ants are particularly good creatures for spiders to pretend to be – many animals ...

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Environment22 Mar 2024

Scientists uncover evidence that microplastics are contaminating archaeological remains

Researchers have for the first time discovered evidence of microplastic contamination in archaeological soil samples. The team discovered tiny microplastic particles in deposits located more than seven metres deep, in samples dating back to the first or early second century and excavated in the late 1980s. Preserving archaeology in situ has been the preferred approach to managing historical sites for a generation. However, the research team say the findings could prompt a rethink, with the tiny particles potentially compromising the preserved remains. Microplastics are small plastic particles, ranging from 1μm (one thousandth of a millimetre) ...

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Environment22 Mar 2024

Decommissioned offshore structures could offer only limited ecological benefits

Decommissioned offshore structures offer limited long-term ecological benefits if they are simply left in the ocean to serve as artificial reefs, a new study suggests. The research, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, saw researchers carrying out a comprehensive analysis of existing studies into the environmental impacts of marine artificial structures – including oil and gas platforms and offshore wind farms – all over the world. It highlighted that such installations can offer some ecological benefits – including increasing the diversity and abundance of fish species – in areas where the ...

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