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Categories: Energy: Technology, Geoscience: Severe Weather

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Climate change is aggravating the impact of droughts -- one of the factors that only affect plant physiology -- on all plant ecosystems worldwide. Although new tools have been developed to detect and assess drought stress in plants -- transcriptomic or metabolomic technologies, etc. -- they are still difficult to apply in natural ecosystems, especially in remote areas and developing countries.

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Researchers have identified 26 global warming accelerators known as amplifying feedback loops that the researchers say aren't being properly included in climate models. They note that the findings add urgency to the need to respond to the climate crisis and provide a roadmap for policymakers aiming to avert the most severe consequences of a warming planet.

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Researchers have engineered an electrostatic face mask that can 'self-charge' through the user's breathing and continuously replenish its electrostatic charge as the user wears and breathes through the mask. This significantly increase the filtering performance in prolonged use of the mask for up to 60 hours, compared to four hours for a conventional surgical mask. This also benefits the environment.

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Slipping and sliding on snowy or icy roads is dangerous. Salt and sand help melt ice or provide traction, but excessive use is bad for the environment. And sometimes, a surprise storm can blow through before these materials can be applied. Now, researchers ave filled microcapsules with a chloride-free salt mixture that's added into asphalt before roads are paved, providing long-term snow melting capabilities in a real-world test.

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Researchers have found a way to use small shocks of electricity to disinfect water, reducing energy consumption, cost, and environmental impact. The technology could be integrated into the electric grid or even powered by batteries.

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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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For all of the still-indistinguishable-from-magic wizardry packed into the three pounds of the adult human brain, it obeys the same rule as the other living tissue it controls: Oxygen is a must. So it was with a touch of irony that a scientists offered his explanation for a technological wonder -- movable, data-covered walls mere atoms wide -- that may eventually help computers behave more like a brain. 'There was unambiguous evidence that oxygen vacancies are responsible for this,' Tsymbal said.

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Researchers chiral phonons to convert wasted heat into spin information -- without needing magnetic materials. The finding could lead to new classes of less expensive, energy-efficient spintronic devices for use in applications ranging from computational memory to power grids.

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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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A research team has developed an operando reflection interference microscope (RIM) that provides a better understanding of how batteries work, which has significant implications for the next generation of batteries.

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Antiferroelectric materials have electrical properties that make them advantageous for use in high-density energy storage applications. Researchers have now discovered a size threshold beyond which antiferroelectrics lose those properties, becoming ferroelectric.

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Excessive use of fossil fuels leads to undesired carbon dioxide (CO2) generation, accelerating climate change. One way to tackle this is by converting CO2 into value-added chemicals. On this front, researchers have recently utilized a novel redox couple, for the purpose.

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The endangered Bahama Warbler may be surviving on just one island following Hurricane Dorian's devastation in 2019, according to researchers. A new study shows the bird's distribution and ecology on Grand Bahama before the hurricane struck. But the team says that the warbler may now only survive on neighboring Abaco island, after hurricane Dorian destroyed the bird's forest habitat on Grand Bahama. The research comes from the same team that found what is thought to have been the last living Bahama Nuthatch, previously thought to have been extinct.

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Some defects can be good. A new study shows that laser-induced defects in lithium-ion battery materials improve the performance of the battery.

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Concerns are mounting among policymakers and utility companies amid the impact of severe weather on the nation's electrical grids. In recent months, electrical grids in Texas have been tested to the point of near failure. So it seems like perfect timing that new research identifies a new method that provides the best way to utilize 'direct load control contracts' to mitigate electricity demand surges, increase grid reliability and reduce electricity cost. All of this right down to the individual household.

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The collapse of the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age has been blamed on various factors, from war with other territories to internal strife. Now, scientists have used tree ring and isotope records to pinpoint a more likely culprit: three straight years of severe drought.

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New global modelling predicts the devastating socioeconomic impacts of future extreme coastal flooding for developing nations caused by climate change, with Asia, West Africa and Egypt facing severe costs in the coming decades.

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A new sodium battery technology shows promise for helping integrate renewable energy into the electric grid. The battery uses Earth-abundant raw materials such as aluminum and sodium.

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The Arctic is rapidly losing sea ice, even during winter months when temperatures are below freezing and ice should be recovering from the summer melt. A new study found powerful storms called atmospheric rivers are increasingly reaching the Arctic in winter, slowing sea ice recovery and accounting for a third of all winter sea ice decline, according to a team led by Penn State scientists.

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Widespread tree scorch in the Pacific Northwest that became visible shortly after multiple days of record-setting, triple-digit temperatures in June 2021 was more attributable to heat than to drought conditions, researchers say.