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Categories: Environmental: Ecosystems, Environmental: Water
Published Vastly more sustainable, cost-effective method to desalinate industrial wastewater



Engineers are developing a cutting-edge process that can reduce energy consumption and cost of water desalination.
Published Caribbean seagrasses provide services worth $255B annually, including vast carbon storage, study shows



Caribbean seagrasses provide about $255 billion in services to society annually, including $88.3 billion in carbon storage, according to a new study. The study has put a dollar value on the many services -- from storm protection to fish habitat to carbon storage -- provided by seagrasses across the Caribbean, which holds up to half the world's seagrass meadows by surface area and contains about one-third of the carbon stored in seagrasses worldwide.
Published Engineers 'strike gold' with innovation that recovers heavy metals from biosolids



Engineers have developed a cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to remove heavy metals, including copper and zinc, from biosolids. The team's work advances other methods for heavy-metal removal by recycling the acidic liquid waste that is produced during the recovery phase, instead of throwing it away.
Published Climate change could lead to 'widespread chaos' for insect communities



New research explores how a warming world could impact ecosystems and derail the development of new species.
Published PFAS found in blood of dogs, horses living near Fayetteville, NC



Researchers detected elevated PFAS levels in the blood of pet dogs and horses from Gray's Creek, N.C. -- including dogs that only drank bottled water.
Published Environmental risks and opportunities of orphaned oil and gas wells



Researchers are leading an international team whose goal is to create a framework to help governments in the U.S. and around the world assess and prioritize remediation strategies for orphaned oil and gas wells. These inactive wells represent environmental risks since they have the potential to contaminate water supplies, degrade ecosystems, and emit methane and other air pollutants that are harmful to human health. But plugging the wells also offers various potential environmental opportunities such as underground storage of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, or the development of geothermal energy systems.
Published New research reveals the impact of different species and their traits on human wellbeing



New research has revealed that well-functioning ecosystems are crucial to human health and wellbeing, with human-biodiversity interactions delivering wellbeing gains equating to substantial healthcare cost-savings, when scaled-up across populations.
Published Supersized fruit eater database on climate change frontline



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.
Published New study reveals irrigation's mixed effects around the world



Trajectory of irrigation water use in many regions is unsustainable, but practice is vital in managing climate change and future agricultural development, researchers conclude.
Published To boost supply chains, scientists are looking at ways to recover valuable materials from water



Researchers are exploring the different ways of harvesting materials from water.
Published How fungus farming ants keep their gardens healthy



'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.
Published Navigating underground with cosmic-ray muons



Superfast, subatomic-sized particles called muons have been used to wirelessly navigate underground in a reportedly world first. By using muon-detecting ground stations synchronized with an underground muon-detecting receiver, researchers were able to calculate the receiver's position in the basement of a six-story building. As GPS cannot penetrate rock or water, this new technology could be used in future search and rescue efforts, to monitor undersea volcanoes, and guide autonomous vehicles underground and underwater.
Published How will a warming world impact the Earth's ability to offset our carbon emissions?



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.
Published We've pumped so much groundwater that we've nudged Earth's spin



By pumping water out of the ground and moving it elsewhere, humans have shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted nearly 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) east between 1993 and 2010 alone, according to a new study.
Published This salty gel could harvest water from desert air



Engineers synthesized a superabsorbent material that can soak up a record amount of moisture from the air, even in desert-like conditions.
Published 10-year countdown to sea-ice-free Arctic



Research team predicts Arctic without ice by the end of 2030s if current increasing rate of greenhouse gas emission continues.
Published Scientists discover urea in atmosphere revealing profound consequences for climate



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.
Published Earth was created much faster than we thought: This makes the chance of finding other habitable planets in the Universe more likely



Over the past decades, researchers thought Earth was created over a period of more than 100 million years. However, a new study from suggests that the creation of Earth was much more rapid, and that water and other essential ingredients for life were delivered to Earth very early on.
Published The life below our feet: Team discovers microbes thriving in groundwater and producing oxygen in the dark



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.
Published Newly planted vegetation accelerates dune erosion during extreme storms, research shows



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