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Categories: Environmental: Ecosystems, Physics: Optics

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To conserve precious and fragile biodiversity hotspots, a crucial step is knowing how the fruit eaters are doing. To assist in that, scientists and students have supersized a database to keep track of such animals and birds.

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'Weed early and often' is the key to a productive garden. Interestingly, certain species of ants are also avid gardeners, a practice they've refined over 50 million years. They too weed their underground fungus gardens, but how they know what to weed out has been a mystery. Now, a multidisciplinary team of scientists report how ants distinguish the good fungus from the bad.

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New work deploys a bold new approach for inferring the temperature sensitivity of ecosystem respiration -- which represents one side of the equation balancing carbon dioxide uptake and carbon dioxide output in terrestrial environments. This will improve scientists' models for climate change scenarios.

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Engineers synthesized a superabsorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions.

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Research team predicts Arctic without ice by the end of 2030s if current increasing rate of greenhouse gas emission continues.

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A study demonstrates that graphene-based materials can be used to efficiently convert high-frequency signals into visible light, and that this mechanism is ultrafast and tunable. These outcomes open the path to exciting applications in near-future information and communication technologies.

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A new process enables printing of nanometer-scale quartz glass structures directly onto semiconductor chips. A hybrid organic-inorganic polymer resin is used as feedstock material for 3D printing of silicon dioxide. Since the process works without sintering, the required temperatures are significantly lower. Simultaneously, increased resolution enables visible-light nanophotonics.

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Areas of the ocean that are rich in marine life are having a bigger impact on our ecosystems and the climate than previously thought, new research suggests.

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A cutting-edge experiment has revealed the quantum dynamics of one of nature's most crucial processes.

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A survey of groundwater samples drawn from aquifers beneath more than 80,000 square miles of Canadian prairie reveals ancient groundwaters harbor not only diverse and active microbial communities, but also unexpectedly large numbers of microbial cells. Strikingly, some of these microbes seem to produce 'dark oxygen' (in the absence of sunlight) in such abundance that the oxygen may nourish not only those microbes, but may leak into the environment and support other oxygen-reliant microbes that can't produce it themselves.

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Newly planted vegetation on coastal sand dunes can accelerate erosion from extreme waves.

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An innovative, decade-long experiment in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains shows carbon stocks buried deep underground are vulnerable to climate change. The findings have implications for mitigating global warming through the natural carbon sinks provided by soil and forests which capture 25% of all carbon emissions.

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New research has found that extreme concentrations of microplastics could increase the temperature of beach sand enough to threaten the development of incubating sea turtles.

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Initial choices about fertilization and grass seeding could have a long-lasting effect on how plants and their associated microbes break down pollution in petroleum-contaminated soils.

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A new class of materials that can absorb low energy light and transform it into higher energy light might lead to more efficient solar panels, more accurate medical imaging and better night vision goggles.

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Researchers have shed light on the life of the ancient reptile Rhynchosaur, which walked the earth between 250-225 million years ago, before being replaced by the dinosaurs.

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Water from the Pacific Ocean flows into the Indian Ocean via the Indonesia Archipelago thanks to a vast network of currents that act as a conveyor belt, transporting warmth and nutrients. Currents can sometimes form circular motions and these are known as eddies. An international group of researchers has modeled the impacts of eddies on the currents that carry water from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean.

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Scientists used a new invariant property of vectorial light to encode information. This quantity, which the team call 'vectorness', scales from 0 to 1 and remains unchanged when passing through a noisy channel.

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MethaneMapper is an artificial intelligence-powered hyperspectral imaging tool that researchers have developed to detect real-time methane emissions and trace them to their sources. The tool works by processing hyperspectral data gathered during overhead, airborne scans of the target area.

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New findings settle the dispute: phonons can be chiral. This fundamental concept, discovered using circular X-ray light, sees phonons twisting like a corkscrew through quartz.