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Environment
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Environment

Mapping an entire subcontinent for sustainable development

Using the first complete dataset of more than 415 million buildings across 50 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers at the University of Chicago created an unprecedented approach to urban development, down to each street block. The new analysis, published this week in Nature, pinpoints where rapidly developing nations lack “last mile” infrastructure and access to public services. It uses high-resolution data to measure street access to each building across the subcontinent, showing ...

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Environment

Safe, practical underground carbon storage could reduce warming by only 0.7°C – almost 10 times less than previously thought

A new IIASA-led study for the first time maps safe areas that can practically be used for underground carbon storage, and estimates that using them all would only cut warming by 0.7°C. The result is almost ten times lower than previous estimates of around 6°C, which considered the total global potential for geological storage, including in risky zones, where storing carbon could trigger earthquakes and contaminate drinking water supplies. The researchers say the study shows geological storage is a scarce, finite resource and warn countries must use ...

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Environment

Colorless solar windows: Transforming architecture into clean power plants

A research team led by Nanjing University has introduced a transparent, colorless, and unidirectional solar concentrator that can be directly coated onto standard window glass. Utilizing cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) multilayers with submicron lateral periodicities, this diffractive-type solar concentrator (CUSC) selectively guides sunlight toward the edge of the window where photovoltaic cells are installed. The study appears in PhotoniX. Unlike conventional luminescent or scattering-based concentrators, which often suffer ...

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Environment

A ‘wasteful’ plant process makes a key prenatal vitamin. Climate change may reduce it.

New research from Michigan State University reveals that photorespiration – long considered a wasteful process – is essential for producing a crucial nutrient for preventing birth defects. For the first time, scientists have measured how much carbon flows through photorespiration to make folates, a class of compounds that includes vitamin B9 – known for its importance as a prenatal vitamin. According to the study, led by MSU researcher Berkley Walker, about 6 percent of the carbon absorbed by plants is used to make folates. That number plummets by fivefold when photorespiration is suppressed. These findings, published in Nature Plants, could help scientists engineer ...

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Environment

Countries’ carbon budget math is broken

Climate action is falling behind on the goals as stated in the Paris Agreement. To meet those goals, countries must act according to their ‘fair share’ targets. However, researchers from Utrecht University found a bias in how ambition and fairness assessments were calculated until now: “previous studies assessing countries climate ambition share a feature that rewards high emitters at the expense of the most vulnerable ones.” This finding influences climate change mitigations globally. The research, led by Yann Robiou du Pont, was published on 3 September in Nature Communications. The ...

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Environment

Could a new method offer a sustainable solution for lithium recovery?

Society is experiencing increased global demand for lithium, a critical resource for rechargeable batteries in electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and energy storage systems. Conventional lithium extraction methods from ore reserves or liquid lithium resources are saddled with low efficiency, high costs, and environmental concerns, but researchers have now developed a promising new method. As described in Advanced Functional Materials, the method involves a solar-powered evaporator that extracts lithium from saline, or salt, lakes. The method relies ...

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Environment

Desert soils emit greenhouse gases in minutes — even without live microbes

SDE BOKER, Israel, September 3, 2025 — A groundbreaking study from researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev reveals that desert soils can emit powerful greenhouse gases within minutes of being wetted—even in the absence of microbial life. Published by Dr. Isaac Yagle and Prof. Ilya Gelfand at BGU's Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research in Scientific Reports, the study challenges long-standing assumptions that soil microbes are solely responsible for post-rain “pulse emissions” of gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitrous oxide (N₂O), and nitric oxide (NO). ...

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Environment

Fossil fish sheds new light on extra teeth evolution to devour prey

Experts have uncovered the earliest known example of a fish with extra teeth deep inside its mouth - a 310-million-year-old fossilised ray-finned fish that evolved a unique way of devouring prey. Platysomus parvulus had a unique way of eating never seen in ray-finned fish from that time – a ‘tongue bite’, using a special set of teeth on the floor and roof of the mouth to help it crush and chew tough food like shells or insects. Most fish today use their jaws to bite and chew, but some also have tongue bites, which work like a ...

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Environment

Wildfire ‘char’ may help suppress methane

It's hard to believe that there is anything positive that could come out of wildfires. They have devastated homes, taken lives, erased memories, leveled cities and destroyed our forests and wildlands. But a University of Delaware professor has found that there is something of value to be learned from what’s left behind in the remnants. The charred debris left in the wake of wildfires, such as those currently burning in Colorado, Canada and Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park, is known as wildfire char. UD’s Pei Chiu, professor of civil, construction ...

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Environment

Deforestation reduces rainfall by 74% and increases temperatures by 16% in the Amazon during the dry season, study says

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is responsible for approximately 74.5% of the reduction in rainfall and 16.5% of the temperature increase in the biome during the dry season. For the first time, researchers have quantified the impact of vegetation loss and global climate change on the forest. A study led by scientists from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil provides fundamental results to guide effective mitigation and adaptation strategies. These are the target themes of the United Nations Climate Conference (COP30), which is scheduled ...

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Environment

Farming strategies to protect biodiversity

To protect biodiversity, a meta-analysis finds that agriculture should use a combination of biodiversity-friendly approaches and protected areas. For decades, scientists have debated how agriculture can both feed the world and safegaurd biodiversity. Should farms be managed in a way that allows non-food species to thrive alongside crops and livestock, an approach known as “land sharing?” Or should agriculture be maximized to produce the highest yield achievable in the smallest space possible, enabling other ...

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Environment

The tipping of the last resilient glaciers

Too little snowfall is now also shaking the foundations of some of the world’s most resilient 'water towers', a new study led by the Pellicciotti group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) shows. After establishing a monitoring network on a new benchmark glacier in central Tajikistan, the international team of researchers was able to model the entire catchment’s behavior from 1999 to 2023. The results, showing decreasing glacier health, were published in Communications Earth & Environment. High-mountain Asia has been nicknamed the Third Pole ...

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Environment

No-sort plastic recycling is near

The future of plastic recycling may soon get much less complicated, frustrating and tedious. In a new study, Northwestern University chemists have introduced a new plastic upcycling process that can drastically reduce — or perhaps even fully bypass — the laborious chore of pre-sorting mixed plastic waste. The process harnesses a new, inexpensive nickel-based catalyst that selectively breaks down polyolefin plastics consisting of polyethylenes and polypropylenes — the single-use kind that dominates nearly ...

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Environment

Solar Orbiter traces superfast electrons back to Sun

The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter mission has split the flood of energetic particles flung out into space from the Sun into two groups, tracing each back to a different kind of outburst from our star. The Sun is the most energetic particle accelerator in the Solar System. It whips up electrons to nearly the speed of light and flings them out into space, flooding the Solar System with so-called ‘Solar Energetic Electrons’ (SEEs). Researchers have now used Solar Orbiter to pinpoint the source of these energetic electrons and trace what we see out in space back to what’s actually ...

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Environment

High Mountain Asia’s shrinking glaciers linked to monsoon changes

Glaciers across High Mountain Asia are losing more than 22 gigatons of ice per year—the equivalent to nearly 9 million Olympic swimming pools, according to research from the University of Utah and Virginia Tech. The impact of a warming climate on glacial loss is undisputed—this new study provides the first evidence that seasonal shifts in rainfall and snowfall patterns, particularly of the South Asian monsoons, are also exacerbating glacier melting across the region. “These findings highlight that glaciers dominated by the South Asian monsoons, such as the Central Himalaya, ...

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Environment

All DRII-ed up: How do plants recover after drought?

LA JOLLA (August 29, 2025)—A plant’s number one priority is to grow—a feat that demands sunlight, nutrients, and water. If just one of these three inputs is missing, like water in a drought, growth halts. You might then think that at the end of that drought, the plant would jump right back into growing. Instead, its priorities shift. Salk plant biologists used advanced single-cell and spatial transcriptomic techniques to look closely at how a small, flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana recovers after drought. They discovered that immunity became the plant’s number one priority during this ...

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Environment

Scientists track lightning “pollution” in real time using NASA satellite

Picture this: You’re stuck in traffic on a summer afternoon, checking the weather app on your phone as dark storm clouds roll in. You might think about power outages or possible flooding, but you probably don’t think about how every lightning bolt that flashes across the sky also emits a gas, nitrogen oxide (NO), that is also emitted in the exhaust from your car’s engine. Yet, that’s exactly what occurs during a thunderstorm. For the first time, scientists from the University of Maryland were able to detect lightning and its impact on air quality using high-frequency ...

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Environment

Thawing permafrost raised carbon dioxide levels after the last ice age

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere vary naturally between ice ages and interglacial periods. A new study by researchers at the University of Gothenburg shows that an unexpectedly large proportion of carbon dioxide emissions after the ice age may have come from thawing permafrost. For a long time, it was the shifts between ice ages and interglacial periods that determined how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. During ice ages, CO2 levels fell, only to rise by around 100 ppm (parts per million) during interglacial ...

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Environment

Unusual carbon dioxide-rich disk detected around young star challenges planet formation models

A study led by Jenny Frediani at Stockholm University has revealed a planet-forming disk with a strikingly unusual chemical composition: an unexpectedly high abundance of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in regions where Earth-like planets may one day form. The discovery, made using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), challenges long-standing assumptions about the chemistry of planetary birthplaces. The study is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Unlike most nearby planet-forming disks, where water vapor dominates the inner regions, this disk is surprisingly ...

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Environment

Wildfire mitigation strategies can cut destruction by half, study finds

Since January’s wildfires flattened entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, displacing 12,900 households and causing an estimated $30 billion in losses, California’s many other fire-prone communities have been eager for solutions to better protect themselves. A new UC Berkeley-led study provides these communities and their lawmakers with actionable data on how wildfire mitigation strategies can reduce the destructiveness of wildfires by as much as 50%. One option to reduce wildfire damage is home hardening, which ...

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Environment

When bison are room to roam, they reawaken the Yellowstone ecosystem

On Aug. 28, scientists from Washington and Lee University, the National Park Service and the University of Wyoming published research in Science magazine shedding new light on the value of bison recovery efforts in Yellowstone National Park. Bill Hamilton, John T. Perry Jr. Professor in Research Science at Washington and Lee University, and Chris Geremia, a researcher with the National Park Service at Yellowstone, served as co-first authors, with co-author Jerod Merkle, associate professor and Knobloch Professor in Migration Ecology and Conservation at the University of Wyoming. While momentum is building to restore bison ...

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Environment

New self-assembling material could be the key to recyclable EV batteries

Today’s electric vehicle boom is tomorrow’s mountain of electronic waste. And while myriad efforts are underway to improve battery recycling, many EV batteries still end up in landfills. A research team from MIT wants to help change that with a new kind of self-assembling battery material that quickly breaks apart when submerged in a simple organic liquid. In a new paper published in Nature Chemistry, the researchers showed the material can work as the electrolyte in a functioning, solid-state ...

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Environment

An ancient signpost: Minute fossils tell big story about arthropod evolution

A tiny fossil of a sea creature that lived more than half a billion years ago sheds new light on the evolution of arthropods, the most species-rich and successful group of animals to inhabit the Earth, according to a study published in Nature Communications. One of the last remaining enigmas surrounding arthropod evolution has been the split of the tree of life separating the two largest groups of arthropods: mandibulates, the group including insects, crustaceans, millipedes and centipedes; and chelicerates, the group that includes spiders, scorpions and their kin. New analyses of fossils of an extinct segmented creature known as Jiangfengia multisegmentalis reveal ...

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Environment

Nearly 80% of whale sharks in this marine tourism hotspot have human-caused scars

Whale sharks, the largest living fish species, are classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Over the past 75 years, populations have declined by more than 50% worldwide, and by up to 63% in the Indo-Pacific region. Because whale sharks take up to 30 years to become sexually mature, populations can only recover slowly from threats like hunting for fins, meat, and oil, habitat loss, and entanglement in fishing nets. Now, an international group of researchers has shown that in the Bird’s Head Seascape off Indonesian West Papua, 62% of whale sharks have scars and injuries from preventable ...

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Environment

Certain communities of pond plants may increase greenhouse gases

CORNELL UNIVERSITY MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE FOR RELEASE: August 27, 2025 Kaitlyn Serrao 607-882-1140 kms465@cornell.edu Certain communities of pond plants may increase greenhouse gases ITHACA, N.Y. - The composition of aquatic plant communities in shallow freshwater bodies, including floating plants, submerged plants and phytoplankton, can have important effects on greenhouse gas production, transport and emissions, according to a new study by Cornell University researchers. The findings could lead to aquatic plant management strategies that help mitigate the release of gases such as methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2) ...

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