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Environment
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Environment

A Coral reef’s daily pulse reshapes microbes in surrounding waters

A new study shows that coral reefs don’t just provide a home for ocean life, they also help set the daily “schedule” for tiny microbes living in the water nearby. Over the course of a single day, the quantity and types of microbes present can shift dramatically. To see this in detail, researchers took frequent water samples and used a mix of genetic and ecological methods and tools, as well as advanced imaging techniques, to track what was happening hour by hour. They found that reefs can shape microbial communities ...

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Environment

Interaction of climate change and human activity and its impact on plant diversity in Qinghai-Tibet plateau

The Qinghai-Tibet plateau (QTP) is the largest and highest plateau in the world, and is an important center for biodiversity that houses an array of high-elevation ecosystems. Despite its importance, QTP has faced multiple conservation challenges over the past decades, in particular due to climate changes (e.g. rising temperature, changing precipitation patterns, and an increase in extreme weather) and over exploitation of natural resources by human activities. Despite growing evidence that plant diversity on QTP ...

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Environment

Chitin based carbon aerogel offers a cleaner way to store thermal energy

A team of materials scientists has developed a new bio based carbon material that can store thermal energy more efficiently while preventing one of the most persistent problems in phase change materials leakage during melting. The study demonstrates how carbon derived from chitin, a natural polymer found in crustacean shells and fungi, can stabilize heat storing compounds and improve their performance for energy applications. Phase change materials store and release heat as they melt and solidify, making them attractive for applications such as building temperature regulation, solar energy storage, and electronic thermal management. However, many organic phase change materials suffer ...

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Environment

Tracing hidden sources of nitrate pollution in rapidly changing rural urban landscapes

Nitrate pollution has become one of the most widespread water quality challenges in intensively farmed regions around the world, threatening drinking water safety, aquatic ecosystems, and downstream lakes. A new study published in Nitrogen Cycling reveals how human activities in rural urban transition zones are reshaping the nitrogen cycle, allowing nitrate to move through rivers and groundwater and ultimately reach large freshwater lakes. The research focuses on the rural urban ecotone of the Yangtze River Delta in eastern China, an area where agriculture, ...

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Environment

Climate policies can backfire by eroding “green” values, study finds

A popular vision of life after climate action looks like vegetarians riding bikes, city centers without cars, and people foregoing air travel. But a paper published in Nature Sustainability finds that climate policies targeting lifestyle changes (say, urban car bans) actually may weaken people’s green values, thereby undermining support for other needed environmental policies. “Policies don’t just spur a target behavior. We find that they can change people’s underlying values: leading to unintended negative effects, but also possibly cultivating green values,” says SFI Complexity Postdoctoral ...

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Environment

Air pollution exposure and birth weight

About The Study: In this cohort study, higher fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure was associated with lower birth weight for gestational age z score, with critical windows identified during early pregnancy to mid-pregnancy; however, findings varied by sex and region. Understanding windows of susceptibility to environmental exposures can help guide research on underlying biological processes and can inform strategies for limiting exposure during certain periods of pregnancy. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Whitney Cowell, PhD, email whitney.cowell@nyulangone.org. To ...

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Environment

Biomass-based carbon capture spotlighted in newly released global climate webinar recording

As countries around the world grapple with the challenge of achieving net-zero emissions, a newly released online webinar recording is drawing attention to one of the most promising and underappreciated climate solutions: biomass-based carbon capture. The full recording of the international seminar, held online on December 17, 2025, is now freely available on YouTube, offering researchers, policymakers, and the public an accessible deep dive into how nature’s carbon cycle can be harnessed for large-scale climate mitigation. The webinar, ...

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Environment

Illuminating invisible nano pollutants: advanced bioimaging tracks the full journey of emerging nanoscale contaminants in living systems

Invisible pollutants at the nanoscale are quietly entering bodies and ecosystems, yet standard toxicology tools still treat living organisms like a black box. A new perspective article in the journal New Contaminants describes how cutting edge bioimaging is turning that black box into a transparent map, revealing where these particles go and how they may harm health. Lighting up hidden nano pollution Emerging nanoscale contaminants such as engineered nanomaterials and nanoplastics are now found in water, soil, food and even the air we breathe, but their tiny size and complex behavior make them hard to track with traditional methods. Conventional ...

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Environment

Fathers’ microplastic exposure tied to their children’s metabolic problems

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A study led by biomedical scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has shown for the first time that a father’s exposure to microplastics (MPs) can trigger metabolic dysfunctions in his offspring. The research, conducted using mouse models, highlights a previously unknown pathway through which environmental pollutants impact the health of future generations. While MPs have already been detected in human reproductive systems, the study, published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, is the first to bridge the gap between paternal ...

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Environment

Japanese eels, climate change, and river temperature

The distribution of Japanese eels (Anguilla japonica) at the northern edge of the species’ range appears to be shaped by river water temperature, which is influenced by watershed geology and land use. Osamu Kishida and colleagues conducted electrofishing surveys in 105 rivers across southern Hokkaido, Japan, capturing 222 Japanese eels from 52 rivers. The authors used structural equation modeling that incorporated catch per unit effort, environmental variables, and estimates of glass eel recruitment—the number of juvenile eels that enter rivers from the sea, where ...

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Environment

New species are now being discovered faster than ever before, study suggests

About 300 years ago, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus set out on a bold quest: to identify and name every living organism on Earth. Now celebrated as the father of modern taxonomy, he developed the binomial naming system and described more than 10,000 species of plants and animals. Since his time, scientists have continued to describe new species in the quest to uncover Earth's biodiversity. According to a new University of Arizona-led study published in Science Advances, scientists are discovering species quicker than ever before, with more than 16,000 new species discovered each year. ...

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Environment

New study finds movement of fishing fleets can reveal shifts in marine ecosystems

EMBARGOED until Monday, December 22, 2025, at 12:00 P.M. PST SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have already leveraged the vast troves of geolocation data from vessel-tracking systems to pinpoint where whales and other large marine species are endangered by ship traffic and industrial fishing. Now, in a new study led by Heather Welch at UC Santa Cruz's Institute of Marine Sciences, researchers show how the geolocation data generated by satellites for the global ...

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Environment

Integrating light and structure: Smarter mapping for fragile wetland ecosystems

Accurate classification of wetland vegetation is essential for biodiversity conservation and carbon cycle monitoring. This study developed an adaptive ensemble learning (AEL-Stacking) framework that combines hyperspectral and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data captured by UAVs to precisely identify vegetation species in karst wetlands. The approach achieved up to 92.77% accuracy—substantially outperforming traditional models—and revealed how spectral and structural features jointly improve ecosystem mapping and restoration strategies. Karst wetlands are globally significant ecosystems that regulate ...

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Environment

How climate policies that incentivize and penalize can drive the clean energy transition

A new study from a team of researchers that includes faculty from the University of California San Diego and Princeton University shows how a mix of subsidies for clean energy and taxes on pollution can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. While these kinds of policy mixes are widely used in the real world, the the study, published in Nature Climate Change is the first to show how the combination of such policies can be simulated in economic models that are the backbone of nearly all climate policy discussions – including ...

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Environment

Third symposium spotlights global challenge of new contaminants in China’s fight against pollution

The Third Symposium on New Contaminant Control held in Shanghai on September 13–14 2025 highlighted how newly recognized pollutants are reshaping China’s environmental agenda. These substances including persistent organic pollutants endocrine disruptors antibiotics and microplastics are often invisible yet can linger in the environment accumulate in living organisms and pose long term risks to ecosystems and human health. Quote and key message “New contaminants do not always make headlines ...

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Environment

Researchers show impact of mountain building and climate change on alpine biodiversity

In a study published in Science Advances on December 19, researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with collaborators from international institutions, explored the impact of mountain building and climate cooling over 30 million years across five major mountain systems in the Northern Hemisphere and revealed that these processes are key drivers of the rich plant diversity found in the Earth's alpine biome. Mountain regions harbor a disproportional share of the world's plant species, but the processes responsible for assembling this diversity over deep time have remained unclear. ...

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Environment

The levers for a sustainable food system

A large-scale model study now shows how the global food system can contribute to the fight against global heating. It identifies 23 levers, calculates their effectiveness and concludes: a decisive transformation of this sector alone, without the indispensable energy transition, can limit the global temperature increase to 1.85°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. In addition, food will become healthier and cheaper, and agriculture will be more compatible with biodiversity conservation. The study was led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in Nature Food. The study ...

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Environment

Breakthrough of the Year: Renewable energy begins to eclipse fossil fuel-based sources

Science has named the seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy worldwide as the 2025 Breakthrough of the Year. Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has relied on fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas for energy. Carbon emissions from these finite resources have greatly contributed to accelerated climate warming. However, 2025 marked a significant shift in this paradigm as renewable energy generated from the Sun and wind began to surpass conventional fossil fuel-based energy production in several domains. This year, global renewable energy, led ...

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Environment

UK’s worst-case climate risks laid bare for lawmakers

British policymakers planning for climate change now have detailed worst-case scenarios at their disposal, filling a gap that left the UK unprepared for extreme outcomes. Scientists from the University of Reading have mapped out the most serious plausible climate threats facing the UK, including year-round cooling of up to 6°C if the Atlantic's currents collapse, temperature rises well above 4°C, or rapid sea level rises of over 2 metres by 2100. The team's research, published today (Thursday, 18 December) in the journal Earth's Future, ...

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Environment

From powder to planet: University of Modena engineers forge a low-carbon future for advanced metal manufacturing

What if the factories building tomorrow’s aerospace components, medical devices, and clean energy systems could do so without fueling the climate crisis? That future is now within reach—thanks to groundbreaking research from Dr. Giulia Colombini at the Department of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari,” University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Laser powder bed fusion of metals (PBF-LB/M) has long been celebrated for its extraordinary precision and near-zero material waste. By selectively melting fine metal powder with a high-powered laser, it creates complex, high-performance ...

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Environment

Deep ocean earthquakes drive Southern Ocean’s massive phytoplankton blooms, study finds

Stanford researchers have uncovered evidence that deep underwater earthquakes can spur the growth of massive phytoplankton blooms at the ocean surface. Phytoplankton are microscopic, plant-like organisms that float in upper ocean layers and serve as the foundation of the oceanic food chain. They also store carbon dioxide pulled from the air and supply a large amount of the planet’s oxygen. The new findings, published Dec. 9 in Nature Geoscience, point to a previously unknown relationship ...

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Environment

New fossil study illuminates on the evolutionary success of frogs

A new study lead by UCC palaeontologists discovered that frogs have conserved their ecology in the last 45 million years. Dr Daniel Falk, together with colleagues from UCC, Germany and the United States, studied 45-million-year-old frogs from the Geiseltal fossil site in central Germany. Remarkably, the fossils preserve skin remnants and layers of microscopic fossilised cell structures called melanosomes. These cell structures synthesise, store, and transport melanin - the pigment responsible for skin, hair, and eye colour. Similar to modern frogs, these melanosomes occur in different body areas including the eyes, the internal organs and the ...

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Environment

NAU team releases 13 years of detailed U.S. CO2 emissions data

New research from Northern Arizona University shows detailed CO2 emissions for the United States from 2010 to 2022. In the first of a series of data releases, professor Kevin Gurney of NAU’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) authored a study, published today in Scientific Data, that includes a database of 13 years of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Future releases will include neighborhood- and city-specific ...

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Environment

Young shark species more vulnerable to extinction

Whether a species just freshly emerged, or it has been around for millions of years does not dictate its vulnerability. This has been the assumption of an old debate on whether species’ age plays a role in extinction risk. Researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) have now led an international study that challenges this idea, at least when it comes to sharks and rays. According to their study, young species are by far the most likely to go extinct. The team examined data from over 20,000 fossil records worldwide dating back to the Cretaceous period, using innovative methods to reconstruct the ...

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Environment

Unveiling non-thermal catalytic origin of direct current-promoted catalysis for energy-efficient transformation of greenhouse gases to valuable chemicals

Catalytic dry reforming of methane (DRM) is a key reaction for the sustainable utilization of major greenhouse gases, CO2 and CH4. However, conventional DRM often suffers from severe catalyst deactivation due to high temperature requirements. Applying direct current (DC) to catalyst materials has emerged as a promising strategy to overcome these limitations, yet the underlying DC-enhanced catalytic mechanism remains elusive. Here, we unveil the non-thermal catalytic origin of DC-applied DRM over Pd/CeO2 through multimodal operando analyses, providing a microscopic physicochemical framework ...

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