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Categories: Chemistry: Thermodynamics, Offbeat: Earth and Climate

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Winter is coming to an end; the last nights of below zero temperatures are here. In the morning, one still spots the occasional icicle on a gutter or car bumper. When you look at these icicles carefully, you may notice that they show a characteristic pattern of ripples -- always around one centimetre wide. What causes these ripples? Using an icicle machine of their own design, physicists and chemists investigated this question, and discovered that salt plays an important part in the formation process of the ripples.

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Good quality indoor air is crucial to our well-being, while impurities in the air can compromise our working capacity and health. Researchers have developed a new method for measuring indoor air quality, making use of fluorescent strains of nematodes.

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Scientists have found the secret behind a property of solid materials known as ferroelectrics, showing that quasiparticles moving in wave-like patterns among vibrating atoms carry enough heat to turn the material into a thermal switch when an electrical field is applied externally.

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Energy-efficient ways of cooling buildings and vehicles will be required in a changing climate. Researchers have now shown that electrical tuning of passive radiative cooling can be used to control temperatures of a material at ambient temperatures and air pressure.

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Sneaker waves are likely fueled by a specific type of wave condition generated by far-off storms and paired with just the right conditions closer to shore, a new study has found.

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By working together, dolphins and net-casting fishers in Brazil each catch more fish, a rare example of an interaction by two top predators that is beneficial to both parties, researchers have concluded following 15 years of study of the practice.

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Researchers already knew the atoms in perovskites react favorably to light. Now they've seen precisely how the atoms move when the 2D materials are excited with light. Their study details the first direct measurement of structural dynamics under light-induced excitation in 2D perovskites.

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The loss of pollinators, such as bees, is a huge challenge for global biodiversity and affects humanity by causing problems in food production. Researchers have now developed the first passively flying robot equipped with artificial muscle. Could this artificial fairy be utilized in pollination?

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Inspired by sea cucumbers, engineers have designed miniature robots that rapidly and reversibly shift between liquid and solid states. On top of being able to shape-shift, the robots are magnetic and can conduct electricity. The researchers put the robots through an obstacle course of mobility and shape-morphing tests.

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What drives crocodile evolution? Is climate a major factor or changes in sea levels? Determined to find answers to these questions, researchers discovered that while changing temperatures and rainfall had little impact on the crocodiles' gene flow over the past three million years, changes to sea levels during the Ice Age had a different effect.

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When two microscopic systems are entangled, their properties are linked to each other irrespective of the physical distance between the two. Manipulating this uniquely quantum phenomenon is what allows for quantum cryptography, communication, and computation. While parallels have been drawn between quantum entanglement and the classical physics of heat, new research demonstrates the limits of this comparison. Entanglement is even richer than we have given it credit for.

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Flexible compounds made with Nobel-winning click chemistry can be used in energy-storing capacitors at high temperatures and electric fields.

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Antarctica is a tough place to work, for obvious reasons -- it's bitterly cold, remote, and wild. However, it's one of the best places in the world to hunt for meteorites. That's partly because Antarctica is a desert, and its dry climate limits the degree of weathering the meteorites experience. On top of the dry conditions, the landscape is ideal for meteorite hunting: the black space rocks stand out clearly against snowy fields.

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Research into how echidnas might respond to a warming climate has found clever techniques used by the animal to cope with heat, including blowing bubbles to wet its nose tip, with the moisture then evaporating and cooling its blood.

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Disturbances to Earth's magnetic field can lead birds astray -- a phenomenon scientists call 'vagrancy' -- even in perfect weather, and especially during fall migration. While other factors such as weather likely play bigger roles in causing vagrancy, researchers found a strong correlation between birds that were captured far outside of their expected range and the geomagnetic disturbances that occurred during both fall and spring migrations.

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Despite their huge potential, the way perovskite solar cells respond to external stimuli -- such as heat or moisture -- has a considerable impact on their stability. Researchers have identified the cause of degradation and developed a technique to improve stability, bringing us closer to widespread adoption of these cost-effective and efficient solar cells.

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A study examined the effects of anthropogenic noise on cognition, beak color, and growth in the zebra finch. Researchers first tested adult zebra finches on a battery of cognition assays while they were exposed to playbacks of urban noise versus birds tested without noise. Urban noises caused the birds to take longer to learn a novel foraging task and to learn an association-learning task. Urban noise exposure also resulted in treated males to develop less bright beak coloration, and females developed beaks with brighter orange coloration, respectively, than untreated birds. Findings suggest that urban noise exposure may affect morphological traits, such as beak color, which influence social interactions and mate choice.

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Synthesizing ammonia, the key ingredient in fertilizer, is energy intensive and a significant contributor to greenhouse gas warming of the planet. Chemists designed and synthesized porous materials -- metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs -- that bind and release ammonia at more moderate pressures and temperatures than the standard Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia. The MOF doesn't bind to any of the reactants, making capture and release of ammonia less energy intensive and greener.

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Pyroelectric catalysis (pyro-catalysis) can convert environmental temperature fluctuations into clean chemical energy, like hydrogen. However, compared with the more common catalysis strategy, such as photocatalysis, pyro-catalysis is inefficient due to slow temperature changes in the ambient environment. Recently, a team has triggered a significantly faster and more efficient pyro-catalytic reaction using localized plasmonic heat sources to rapidly and efficiently heat up the pyro-catalytic material and allow it to cool down. The findings open up new avenues for efficient catalysis for biological applications, pollutant treatment and clean energy production.

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Multinuclear organometallic junctions might be the key to realizing high-performance thermoelectric devices at the nanoscale. The unique electronic structure of organometallic ruthenium alkynyl complexes allowed the researchers to achieve unprecedented heat-to-electricity conversion performance in molecular junctions, paving the way to molecular-scale temperature sensors and thermal energy harvesters.