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Categories: Geoscience: Environmental Issues, Offbeat: Computers and Math

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Exposure to fine particulate air pollutants from coal-fired power plants (coal PM2.5) is associated with a risk of mortality more than double that of exposure to PM2.5 from other sources, according to a new study. Examining Medicare and emissions data in the U.S. from 1999 to 2020, the researchers also found that 460,000 deaths were attributable to coal PM2.5 during the study period -- most of them occurring between 1999 and 2007, when coal PM2.5 levels were highest.

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Engineers have achieved a world first by manufacturing the first back-contact micrometric photovoltaic cells.

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A new study of shallow-water ecosystems estimates that, by 2100, climate change and coastal land usage could result in significant shrinkage of coral habitats, tidal marshes, and mangroves, while macroalgal beds remain stable and seagrass meadows potentially expand.

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Researchers create transistors combining silicon with biological silk, using common microprocessor manufacturing methods. The silk protein can be easily modified with other chemical and biological molecules to change its properties, leading to circuits that respond to biology and the environment.

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As the planet gets hotter, animal and plant species around the world will be faced with new, potentially unpredictable living conditions, which could alter ecosystems in unprecedented ways. A new study investigates the importance of temperature in determining where animal species are currently found to better understand how a warming climate might impact where they might live in the future.

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To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and limit global heating to 1.5°C, global annual emissions will need to drop radically over the coming decades. Climate economists say that this goal could still be within our reach. They identify key 'sensitive intervention points' that could unlock significant progress towards the Paris Agreement with the least risk and highest impact.

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Hopfions, magnetic spin structures predicted decades ago, have become a hot and challenging research topic in recent years. New findings open up new fields in experimental physics: identifying other crystals in which hopfions are stable, studying how hopfions interact with electric and spin currents, hopfion dynamics, and more.

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Quinoa and many other extremely resilient plants are covered with strange balloon-like 'bladders' that for 127 years were believed to be responsible for protecting them from drought and salt. Research results reveal this not to be the case. These so-called bladder cells serve a completely different though important function. The finding makes it likely that even more resilient quinoa plants will now be able to be bred, which could lead to the much wider cultivation of this sustainable crop worldwide.

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The land use, land use change, and forestry sector plays a strong role in achieving global climate targets, but a gap exists between how scientists and countries account for its emissions. A new study highlights how mitigation benchmarks change when assessing IPCC scenarios from a national inventory perspective, with net-zero timings arriving up to five years earlier and cumulative emissions to net-zero being 15-18% smaller.

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Despite public perception, the Antarctic ozone hole has been remarkably massive and long-lived over the past four years; researchers believe chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) aren't the only things to blame.

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The deep sea is home to one of the largest animal communities on earth which is increasingly exposed to environmental pressures. However, our knowledge of its inhabitants and their response to human-induced stressors is still limited. A new study now provides first insights into the stress response of a pelagic deep-sea jellyfish to ocean warming and sediment plumes caused by deep-sea mining.

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Global measurements and model calculations show that the complex relationship between the chemistry and climate impact of aerosol particles can be successfully captured by a simple formula.

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  The research makes it clear that ensuring the sustained well-being of our planet requires a more serious commitment toward new carbon dioxide removal technologies, and a faster scale-up of their production.

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Forest modeling shows that a site's productivity -- an indicator of how fast trees grow and how much biomass they accumulate -- is the main factor that determines which time period between timber harvests allows for maximum above-ground carbon sequestration.

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Concerted action is required to mitigate the impact of warming on polar ecosystems and sustainably manage these unique habitats.  

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An engineering research team is pioneering a new method, based on percussion, to detect pipeline elbow erosion to prevent economic losses, environmental pollution and other safety issues.  

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The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano changed the chemistry and dynamics of the stratosphere in the year following the eruption, leading to unprecedented losses in the ozone layer of up to 7% over large areas of the Southern Hemisphere.  

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An analysis of breast cancer showed that the state’s urban counties had higher overall incidences of disease than rural counties, especially at early stages upon diagnosis.

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When researchers asked hundreds of people to watch other people shake boxes, it took just seconds for almost all of them to figure out what the shaking was for. The deceptively simple work by perception researchers is the first to demonstrate that people can tell what others are trying to learn just by watching their actions. The study reveals a key yet neglected aspect of human cognition, and one with implications for artificial intelligence. 'Just by looking at how someone's body is moving, you can tell what they are trying to learn about their environment,' said author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences who investigates how vision and thought interact. 'We do this all the time, but there has been very little research on it.'

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Scientists have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system -- in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints -- allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order to solve tasks.