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Categories: Environmental: General, Physics: General

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Researchers developed a way to fingerprint organofluorine compounds -- sometimes called 'forever chemicals' --which could help authorities trace them to their source when they end up in aquifers, waterways or soil.

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Scientists at three research institutions capture the pulsing motion of atoms in diamond, uncovering the relationship between the diamond's strain and the behavior of the quantum information hosted within.

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Modern commercial aircraft flying at high altitudes create longer-lived planet-warming contrails than older aircraft, a new study has found.

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Researchers have turned concrete from a demolished school building and carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air into new blocks strong enough to build a house with. The process involved grinding the old concrete into powder, reacting it with CO2 from the air, pressurizing it in layers in a mold and finally heating it to form the new block. Instead of making buildings from new concrete only, this technique could offer a way to recycle old materials while also trapping carbon dioxide in the process. The blocks could theoretically be remade again and again, through the same process.

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Researchers report that they have fabricated the world's highest-performing high-temperature superconducting wire segment while making the price-performance metric significantly more favorable.

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Pesticides and herbicides are critical to ensuring food security worldwide, but these substances can present a safety risk to people who unwittingly ingest them. Protecting human health, therefore, demands sensitive analytical methods to identify even trace levels of potentially harmful substances. Now, researchers have developed a high-tech imaging method to detect pesticide contamination at low levels, and its application on fruits reveals that current food safety practices may be insufficient.

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Estuaries in South Florida have experienced rapid warming over the past two decades, including a record-breaking marine heat wave in 2023, research shows. The findings paint a troubling picture for the marine life that calls Florida home. Possible causes include evaporation, water capacity and residence time (the amount of time water spends in an estuary). No single factor has been identified as dominant.

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Researchers at University of Galway have developed a new, portable technology for on-the-spot testing of water quality to detect one of the most dangerous types of bacteria. Ireland regularly reports the highest crude incidence rates of the pathogen Shiga toxigenic Escherichia coli -- STEC for short -- in Europe over the recent years.

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Even though climate change is bringing more frequent and severe heat waves, there is no standard, global way to measure heat-wave severity, and existing indices have different thresholds for defining dangerous heat-stress conditions. Researchers report that five out of six existing heat-wave indices were unable to capture the severity and spatial distribution of recent lethal heat waves in India, Spain, and the USA. The sixth index -- the lethal heat-stress index -- was better able to identify dangerous heat-stress conditions, particularly in low-humidity regions.

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Scientists have answered one of the most puzzling questions in plate tectonics: how and why 'stable' parts of continents gradually rise to form some of the planet's greatest topographic features.

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Researchers are using mayonnaise to study and address the stability challenges of nuclear fusion by examining the phases of Rayleigh-Taylor instability. Their innovative approach aims to inform the design of more stable fusion capsules, contributing to the global effort to harness clean fusion energy. Their most recent paper explores the critical transitions between elastic and plastic phases in these conditions.

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In 2023, roughly 60,000 firework shells exploded above Manhattan's East River as part of Macy's Fourth of July show. The resulting air pollutant levels were many times higher in the hours after the display than those seen when smoke from a Canadian wildfire had blanketed the area a month before, according to the results of a new study.

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The world is going to need a lot of weird metals in the coming years, according to chemistry professor. But he isn't talking about lithium, cobalt or even beryllium. He's interested in dysprosium, which is so hidden in the periodic table that you'd be forgiven for thinking he made it up.

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Researchers found that how well light-converting molecules stack together in a solid is important for how well they convert light into electric current. A rigid molecule that stacked well showed excellent electricity generation in an organic solar cell and photocatalyst, easily outperforming a similar flexible molecule that did not stack well. This new way of improving the design of molecules could be used to pioneer the next generation of light-converting devices.

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To protect the Amazon and support the wellbeing of its people, its economy needs to shift from environmentally harmful production to a model built around the diversity of indigenous and rural communities, and standing forests.

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Groundwater is a vital resource, sustaining plants and ecosystems, ensuring agricultural production and serving as a core component of drinking water supplies. However, climate change and anthropogenic pressures can threaten groundwater availability, especially in southwestern Europe. This threat was evaluated by a research team using multidecadal data from more than 12,000 groundwater wells in Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. The surprising finding: Groundwater levels are not declining everywhere as widely believed, but primarily in semi-arid regions with intensive agriculture and frequent droughts. Declines are also observed in temperate regions associated with large urban areas. The authors conclude that, with suitable management practices, groundwater can be utilized sustainably.

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Can plasma be sufficiently heated inside a tokamak using only microwaves? New research suggests it can! Eliminating the central ohmic heating coil normally used in tokamaks will free up much-needed space for a more compact, efficient spherical tokamak.

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Understanding neutrino interactions is crucial for obtaining a complete picture of particle physics and the universe. To date, neutrino interaction cross sections have not been measured at high energy above some hundred gigaelectronvolts at particle colliders. Now, researchers have obtained the first direct observation of electron and muon neutrino interactions in the Teraelectronvolt range at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, using the FASER detector. This study marks a significant step for particle physics research.

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A new study conducted in Canada's two largest cities has linked about 1,100 premature deaths per year to an unregulated air pollutant. Ultrafine particles (UFPs) primarily come from vehicle emissions and industrial activities. Canada's federal and provincial governments have not set concentration limits for UFPs, as they have for larger fine particles known as PM2.5.

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A team developed a new microscopy technique that uses electrical pulses to track the nanosecond dynamics within a material that is known to form charge density waves. Controlling these waves may lead to faster and more energy-efficient electronics.