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Categories: Environmental: Ecosystems, Mathematics: Statistics

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Scientists have built a plant that can produce carbon-neutral liquid fuels from sunlight and air. The next goal will be to take this technology to industrial scale and achieve competitiveness. Researchers now describe how this novel solar reactor functions and outline a policy framework that would provide incentives to expand the production of 'solar kerosene'.

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Heat from a comet exploding just above the ground fused the sandy soil into patches of glass stretching 75 kilometers, a new study found.

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Precambrian cratons -- some of Earth's oldest rocks -- were uninhabitable for microbes for much of their existence, with the longest period of habitability not much beyond a billion years, and many only for the past 50 million to 300 million years, according to a paper correlating Earth's deep biosphere with geologic history.

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Scientists have used down-scaled laboratory models to show how sand dunes move through a landscape, revealing the conditions that determine whether they will pass through hurdles in their path -- like pipelines or walls -- or get stopped in their tracks.

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Water is a scarce commodity in many countries worldwide, but new cost-effective technology pioneered by researchers in Australia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia could ensure sustainable water supplies for decades to come.

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By observing how strange particles called anyons dissipate heat, researchers have shown that they can probe the properties of these particles in systems that could be relevant for topological quantum computing.

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Climate 'tipping points' can be better understood and predicted using climate change data taken from the ancient past, new research shows.

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Plants need water to grow. So if there's water, shouldn't there be more plants? New research shows it's a lot more complicated than that.

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Hot desert sex has resulted in major genetic differences between male and female jojoba plants -- one of only 6 percent of plants that require a male and female plant to reproduce. New research suggests male and female jojoba plants have diverged so much, that the jojoba plant has more novel sex genes than any other known living organism. The discovery may help researchers develop a DNA test to identify male and female jojoba plants, which cannot be distinguished from each other as seedlings - and shed light on how plants adapt to environmental stress.

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The landscape at Lava Beds National Monument in northern California is typically home to sage and junipers, with unique lava caves twisting underneath the surface. But in the summers of 2020 and 2021, wildfires tore through the region, burning thousands of acres and leaving the surface charred.

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The recent Desert Locust upsurge had a major impact on Pakistan's agriculture, with swarms causing immense damage to all types of crops. A team provides an overview of the dynamics of this upsurge, assesses its impact and control measures, and clarifies the role of different stakeholders in the management of this pest, suggesting various improvements for the future.

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Academics have undertaken research that proves Earth Observation satellite imagery can accurately assess the quality and quantity of some habitat types.

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We regularly hear warnings that climate change may lead to 'tipping points': irreversible situations where savanna can quickly change into desert, or the warm gulf stream current can simply stop flowing. But the earth is much more resilient than previously thought. Researchers now show that the concept of tipping points is too simple.

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Researchers studying two solar parks, situated in arid locations, found they produced 'cool islands' extending around 700 meters from the solar park boundaries. The temperature of surrounding land surface was reduced by up to 2.3 degrees at 100 meters away from the solar park, with the cooling effects reducing exponentially to 700 meters. This new discovery is important as it shows the solar park could impact ecological processes, including productivity, decomposition, and ultimately the carbon balance, in the surrounding landscape.

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New dating of an archaeological site in the Thar Desert to 177,000 years ago shows the use of stone handaxes persisted for over 1 million years in India, and may have endured until the arrival of Homo sapiens.

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Scientists are using a new mathematical tool to predict how combinations of genetic mutations cause different types of tumors.

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Using a new mechanistic model of evolution on Earth, researchers can now better explain why the rainforests of Africa are home to fewer species than the tropical forests of South America and Southeast Asia. The key to high species diversity lies in how dynamically the continents have evolved over time.

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The global decline of pollinators threatens the reproductive success of 90 per cent of all wild plants globally and the yield of 85 per cent of the world's most important crops. Pollinators -- mainly bees and other insects -- contribute to 35 per cent of the world's food production. The service provided by pollinators is particularly important for securing food produced by the more than two billion small farmers worldwide. An agroecologist points out that yields could be increased if pollinators were encouraged.

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Mathematical modeling of disease spread suggests that herd immunity could be achieved with fewer vaccine doses by using Bluetooth-based contact-tracing apps to identify people who have more exposure to others -- and targeting them for vaccination.

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Archaeologists have long had a dating problem. The radiocarbon analysis typically used to reconstruct past human demographic changes relies on a method easily skewed by radiocarbon calibration curves and measurement uncertainty. And there's never been a statistical fix that works -- until now.