An almost limitless supply of fresh water exists in the form of water vapor above Earth’s oceans, yet remains untapped, researchers said. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is the first to suggest an investment in new infrastructure capable of harvesting oceanic water vapor as a solution to limited supplies of fresh water in various locations around the world. The study, led by civil and environmental engineering professor and Prairie Research Institute executive director Praveen Kumar, evaluated…
… also for other species. Marking trees are important hotspots of communication for cheetahs: Here they exchange information with and about other cheetahs via scent marks, urine and scats. A team from the Cheetah Research Project of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) now showed that several mammalian species on farmland in Namibia maintain a network for intra- and interspecific communication at cheetah trees. Black-backed jackals, African wildcats and warthogs visited and sniffed the cheetahs’ “places to…
Iron-based fertilizer, engineered into nanoparticles, could help store excess carbon dioxide in the ocean. The urgent need to remove excess carbon dioxide from Earth’s environment could include enlisting some of our planet’s smallest inhabitants, according to an international research team led by Michael Hochella of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Hochella and his colleagues examined the scientific evidence for seeding the oceans with iron-rich engineered fertilizer particles near ocean plankton. The goal would be to feed phytoplankton,…
The University of Hohenheim taps into a new source of protein: an on-farm biorefinery produces protein-based feed for pigs and poultry, other high-quality raw materials, and energy. A tasty dish for chickens: Researchers from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart were able to feed the animals the first 50 kilos of protein extract that were obtained from pasture. Yet the plants found in fields and meadows offer much more than a new source of protein for pigs and poultry: They…
They are the salt-tolerant shrubs that thrive in the toughest of conditions, but according to new UniSA research, mangroves are also avid coastal protectors, capable of surviving in heavy metal contaminated environments. The researchers found that grey mangroves (Avicennia marina) can tolerate high lead, zinc, arsenic, cadmium and copper in contaminated sediment – without sustaining adverse health impacts themselves. The study tested the health of grey mangroves living around the Port Pirie smelter. Using leaf chlorophyll content as a proxy…
— which type of packaging is more sustainable? The packaging world is experiencing a shift away from plastic toward paper, cardboard or paperboard. But how sustainable is this new trend? In its latest report “Reusable plastic crates vs. single-use cardboard boxes — two packag-ing systems in competition”1, the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT and the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP were commissioned by the Stiftung Initiative Mehrweg (SIM) to explain the background to and correlations…
A new model explains that water evaporating from the Arctic Ocean due to a warming climate is transported south and can lead to increased snowfall in northern Eurasia in late autumn and early winter. This information will allow for more accurate predictions of severe weather events. Rising air temperatures due to global warming melt glaciers and polar ice caps. Seemingly paradoxically, snow cover in some areas in northern Eurasia has increased over the past decades. However, snow is a form…
Researchers find new transport route for carbonaceous material from productive Arctic marginal seas to the deep sea. Every year, the cross-shelf transport of carbon-rich particles from the Barents and Kara Seas could bind up to 3.6 million metric tons of CO2 in the Arctic deep sea for millennia. In this region alone, a previously unknown transport route uses the biological carbon pump and ocean currents to absorb atmospheric CO2 on the scale of Iceland’s total annual emissions, as researchers from…
Gadgets that emit small electrical pulses can drastically cut the number of sharks and stingrays caught accidentally on fishing lines, new research shows. A new device called SharkGuard attaches to longline fishing rigs to scare off sharks and rays. In the study, carried out on French boats fishing for tuna, lines fitted with SharkGuard reduced bycatch (accidental catching) of blue sharks by 91% and stingrays by 71%. Catch of the target species, bluefin tuna, also appeared to decline, but further…
550-million-year-old creatures’ message to the present. Earth is currently in the midst of a mass extinction, losing thousands of species each year. New research suggests environmental changes caused the first such event in history, which occurred millions of years earlier than scientists previously realized. Most dinosaurs famously disappeared 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. Prior to that, a majority of Earth’s creatures were snuffed out between the Permian and Triassic periods, roughly 252 million years…
A new study has revealed the potential for sensory deterrents to reduce marine megafauna bycatch in fisheries. The Newcastle University research suggests that sensory deterrents can work in some circumstances and may be part of the solution to reduce bycatch. Sensory deterrents are designed to provide sensory cues for marine megafauna (marine mammals, seabirds, sea turtles, sharks and rays) to avert their contact with fishing gear, whilst maintaining target catch quantity and quality. There are several types of sensory technologies…
CO2 in the deep Earth may be more active than previously thought and may have played a bigger role in climate change than scientists knew before, according to a study by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). The research, led by Prof. PAN Ding, looked into the dissolution of CO2 in water, which has significant implications on ways to reduce the return of carbon from underground to the atmosphere. The vast majority of the Earth’s carbon is…
Start-up LiBCycle takes complete care of used e-car batteries. What began as an idea about a transport container for old batteries has in the meantime grown into a complete recycling service for used batteries. The start-up LiBCycle, founded at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), is committed to Circular Economy and is thus contributing to sustainable mobility. “We don’t want to spend all our time running from one financing round to the next, we want to do something to make…
… while other marine life languishes in the Florida Keys. In the summer of 2020, Florida Museum researchers Tobias Grun and Michał Kowalewski dove into the shallow waters off the coast of the Florida Keys and scoured the ocean floor for sea urchins. Telltale tracks and dimples in the sediment alerted them to the presence of sand dollars, sea biscuits and heart urchins concealed just beneath the surface. Between August and April of the following year, Grun and Kowalewski visited…
KIT researchers and partners suspect that much more plastic is transported in flowing waters than previously assumed and are developing new modelling approaches. Rivers play a key role in the transport of plastic in the environment. “As soon as plastic enters a river, it is transported rapidly and can spread throughout the environment,” says Dr Daniel Valero from the Institute of Water and River Basin Management at KIT and lead author of a new study on plastic transport. “But, depending…
Researchers decipher the history and sensitivity of the largest tropical peatland in Congo. When peat swamps dry out they can release large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because they react so sensitively to climate changes, they are also important tipping points. A study published in Nature by an international team, led by researchers from MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD, France) and the…
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