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Categories: Energy: Alternative Fuels, Paleontology: General

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A team of researchers is working to understand the details of the climate for the eastern portion of the United States from the Miocene, which unfortunately is a blank spot on paleo-climate maps. New findings suggest the future climate will be very close to the warmer, wetter, and more homogeneous climate similar to conditions experienced 5 million years ago.

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Plants can move in ways that might surprise you. Some of them even show 'sleep movements,' folding or raising their leaves each night before opening them again the next day. Now, researchers offer convincing evidence for these nightly movements, also known as foliar nyctinasty, in fossil plants that lived more than 250 million years ago.

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The meat-eating dinosaurs known as theropods that roamed the ancient Earth ranged in size from the bus-sized T. rex to the smaller, dog-sized Velociraptor. Scientists puzzling over how such wildly different dinosaur sizes evolved recently found -- to their surprise -- that smaller and larger theropod dinosaurs like these didn't necessarily get that way merely by growing slower or faster.

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Geologists doing fieldwork in southeastern Utah's Cedar Mountain Formation found carbon isotope evidence that the site, though on land, experienced the same early Cretaceous carbon-cycle change recorded in marine sedimentary rocks in Europe. This ancient carbon-cycle phenomenon, known as the 'Weissert Event' was driven by large, sustained volcanic eruptions in the Southern Hemisphere that greatly increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and produced significant greenhouse climate effects over a prolonged time.

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A common ingredient -- salt -- could have a big role to play in the energy transition to lower carbon energy sources. A study describes how large underground salt deposits could serve as hydrogen holding tanks, conduct heat to geothermal plants, and influence CO2 storage. It also highlights how industries with existing salt expertise, such as solution mining, salt mining, and oil and gas exploration, could help.

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Researchers design a solar harvester with enhanced energy conversion capabilities. The device employs a quasiperiodic nanoscale pattern, meaning most of it is an alternating and consistent pattern, while the remaining portion contains random defects that do not affect its performance. The fabrication process makes use of self-assembling nanoparticles, which form an organized material structure based on their interactions with nearby particles without any external instructions. Thermal energy harvested by the device can be transformed to electricity using thermoelectric materials.

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56 million years ago, the Earth experienced one of the largest and most rapid climate warming events in its history: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which has similarities to current and future warming. This episode saw global temperatures rise by 5-8°C. It was marked by an increase in the seasonality of rainfalls, which led to the movement of large quantities of clay into the ocean, making it uninhabitable for certain living species. This scenario could be repeated today.

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Researchers typically synthesize perovskites in a wet lab, and then apply the material as a film on a glass substrate and explore various applications. A team has instead proposes a novel, physics-based approach, using a substrate of either a layer of metal or alternating layers of metal and dielectric material -- rather than glass.

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Physicists jumped a major hurdle standing in the way of the commercialization of solar cells created with halide perovskites as a lower-cost, higher-efficiency replacement for silicon when generating electricity from the sun.

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Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater, in a critical step towards a truly viable green hydrogen industry. The new method splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen -- skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

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Researchers have reconstructed the brains and inner ears of two British spinosaurs, helping uncover how these large predatory dinosaurs interacted with their environment.

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Aetosaurs had a small head and a crocodile-like body. The land dwellers were up to six meters long and widely distributed geographically. They died out about 204 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic. In Germany, an assemblage of 24 Aetosaurus ferratus individuals, only between 20 and 82 centimeters long, was discovered in 1877. Since then, scientists have been puzzling over whether they were juveniles or small adults. A team has now solved the mystery: Bone examination of two specimens shows that they are juveniles.

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There is currently less sea ice in the Antarctic than at any time in the forty years since the beginning of satellite observation: in early February 2023, only 2.20 million square kilometers of the Southern Ocean were covered with sea ice.

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Researchers reveal the thermal instability that happens within the cells' interface layers, but also offers a path forward towards reliability and efficiency for halide perovskite solar technology.

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About 250 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction killed over 80 per cent of the planet's species. In the aftermath, scientists believe that life on earth was dominated by simple species for up to 10 million years before more complex ecosystems could evolve. Now this longstanding theory is being challenged by a team of international researchers.

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Along the shores of Africa's Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, according to new research. The study presents what are likely to be the oldest examples of a hugely important stone-age innovation known to scientists as the Oldowan toolkit, as well as the oldest evidence of hominins consuming very large animals. Excavations at the site, named Nyayanga and located on the Homa Peninsula in western Kenya, also produced a pair of massive molars belonging to the human species' close evolutionary relative Paranthropus. The teeth are the oldest fossilized Paranthropus remains yet found, and their presence at a site loaded with stone tools raises intriguing questions about which human ancestor made those tools.

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Scientists have compared the relationship among the strength of flight bones, body mass, and the way modern birds fly to better understand the evolution of flight in birds and extinct animals, such as the Pteranodon.

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Hydrogen fuel could be a more viable alternative to traditional fossil fuels, according to University of Surrey researchers who have found that a type of metal-free catalysts could contribute to the development of cost-effective and sustainable hydrogen production technologies.

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The discovery of an 80-million-year-old fossil plant pushes back the known origins of lamiids to the Cretaceous, extending the record of nearly 40,000 species of flowering plants including modern-day staple crops like coffee, tomatoes, potatoes and mint.

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Researchers have pinpointed two intervals when ice and ocean conditions would have been favorable to support early human migration from Asia to North America late in the last ice age, a new paper shows.