Tag: Science

The UK's peatlands face an uncertain future amid the escalating impacts of climate change. Peatlands are critical ecosystems for carbon storage and biodiversity, containing more carbon than all the world's forests despite covering just 3% of the global land surface.

Australian Antarctic Program scientists have released the most comprehensive database of species living in the ice-free areas of Antarctica, after 16 years of research.

How can the latest technology, such as solar cells, be improved? An international research team led by the University of Göttingen is helping to find answers to questions like this with a new technique. For the first time, the formation of tiny, difficult-to-detect particles—known as dark excitons—can be tracked precisely in time and space. These invisible carriers of energy will play a key role in future solar cells, LEDs and detectors. The results are published in Nature Photonics.

Research on race/ethnicity and juvenile court processing in the United States has found that youth of color often have outcomes that are more disadvantaged than those of their White counterparts, and that community context may condition this relationship.

Imagine being at a big marquee event in an arena, like the Super Bowl, with the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, and a sea of jerseys all merging into one chaotic blur. While the frenzied, exciting environment certainly enhances your viewing experience, it can also make it difficult to find the people you came with if you get separated. If you're communicating by phone or waving from the stands, it can be an exhausting game of hide-and-seek amid the noise and commotion.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) today published the updated Air Toxics at School database, a web-based platform that tracks toxic air pollution affecting K–12 and higher education institutions nationwide.

The European project PROMICON issued five policy recommendations to support a new method for the production of sustainable bioplastics from microorganisms.

At Texas A&M University, one research lab is changing the game of droplet microfluidics, a technique that involves conducting experiments in nanoscale droplets of liquid in a controlled environment. The team has developed a system that makes droplet microfluidics faster, lower cost, and more accurate.

Researchers from Zhejiang University and HKUST (Guangzhou) have developed a cutting-edge AI model, ProtET, that leverages multi-modal learning to enable controllable protein editing through text-based instructions. This innovative approach, published in Health Data Science, bridges the gap between biological language and protein sequence manipulation, enhancing functional protein design across domains like enzyme activity, stability, and antibody binding.

The epigenetic state of chromatin, gene activity, and chromosomal positions are interrelated. A research team from the IPK Leibniz Institute (IPK) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has investigated how the chromosomal location affects epigenetic stability and gene expression through chromosome engineering. The results are published in the journal New Phytologist.

Six weeks of research-backed analysis, expert advice and challenges delivered straight to your inbox.

This series offers insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks.

Dubai has many images. Being a hub for international research probably isn’t one, yet

What Universal Impact has learnt from a year of producing the Research Reach Roundup newsletter

The latest Independent Social Research Foundation conference heard how refugees have died after becoming trapped at the border between Poland and Belarus

Alfred Hermida: ‘The scholars who write for The Conversation are taking on journalistic practices, guided and mentored by our team of professional journalists’

The Conversation UK, Curtis Brown and Faber are pleased to announce our three judges for The Conversation Prize for writers: Miriam Frankel, senior science editor at The Conversation UK, Priya Atwal, historian…

The 3MT® competition was sponsored by The Conversation’s Universal Impact subsidiary

Our articles are about 4,000 words in length, and have a distinct storytelling style with rounded characters and compelling narrative arcs.

Are you an academic keen to develop a writing career? Do you have a book idea that has the potential to be a nonfiction bestseller? The Conversation Insights, in partnership with talent agency The Curtis…

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. On 17 December 2024, the 118,000 cubic metre silt and clay Takhini River landslide occurred on a cut bank of the Takhini River, 25 km northwest of Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. The landslide, […]

The discovery of amino acids, abundant ammonia, and the bases of DNA and RNA on asteroid Bennu suggest that materials essential to life might be widespread throughout the solar system.

By analyzing sulfur and volcanic ash entrained in ice cores, researchers pinpointed a caldera in the remote Kuril Islands as the site of an unidentified 19th century eruption.

The mix of metals in China’s Yellow River stays relatively similar as it moves from the upper continental crust to biological life.

Carbon mineralization is a promising solution for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, but we must learn to optimize the complex interplay between reactions and mechanics in fractures to develop a scalable solution.

High heat, dry fuel, and strong winds drove the Palisades and Eaton blazes.

The James Webb Space Telescope offers astronomers a rare glimpse into the chemical composition of a rocky planet’s interior—and the results are “very surprising.”

Three recent studies reveal how the interplay between El Niño and long-term global warming drove the record-breaking global temperatures of 2023.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. At 13:12 local time on 22 February 2023, a large landslide occurred at the Xinjing open-pit coal mine in Inner Mongolia. The failure killed 53 people and injured a further 6 individuals. […]

A dire lack of investment in oceangoing vessels means the U.S. ocean sciences community is lagging, scientists say. Three new vessels will play a part in building capabilities.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters The planet was besieged by 58 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2024, ranking second-highest behind only 2023, which had 73, said insurance broker Gallagher Re in its annual report issued 17. The total damage wrought by weather disasters in 2024 was $402 billion, 20% higher than the 10-year inflation-adjusted average. (Gallagher Re’s historical database extends back to 1990.) A separate report issued January 18 by insurance broker Aon put the total damage wrought by weather disa

A listing of 23 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, January 19, 2025 thru Sat, January 25, 2025. This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks! Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Change Impacts Climate change is forcing us to rethink our sense of ‘home’ – and what it means to lose it   by Talia Fell and Codie Condos Distratis , The Conversation, Jan 16, 2025

Open access notables Managing and mitigating future public health risks: Planetary boundaries, global catastrophic risk, and inclusive wealth, McLaughlin & Beck, Risk Analysis [perspective]: There are two separate conceptualizations for assessing existential risks: Planetary Boundaries (PBs) and global catastrophic risks (GCRs). While these concepts are similar in principle, their underpinning literatures tend not to engage with each other. Research related to these concepts has tended to be siloed in terms of the study of specific threats and also in terms of how these are assumed to materialize; PBs attribute global catastrophes to slow-moving and potentially irreversible global changes, while GCRs fo

This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). 2025 has only just begun, but already climate scientists are working hard to unpick what could be in store for us. As greenhouse gas emissions continue to drive more and more climate change, the overall trend is for more global warming. But other factors - like the El Niño oscillation moving towards La Niña - will also have a major impact. So how hot will 2025 be? And how will climate change affect us in the form of extreme weather disasters? Whether that's heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires - like the ones ravaging Los Angeles right now? Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climatead

This is a re-post from the Climate Brink I have a new paper out today in the journal Dialogues on Climate Change exploring both the range of end-of-century climate outcomes in the literature under current policies and the broader move away from high-end emissions scenarios. Current policies are defined broadly as policies in place today and a continuation of trends in technology costs, but no additional climate policy enacted for the remainder of the century. The figure below shows the literature summary I put together (as of fall 2024), which includes estimates of current policy outcomes (in red), outcomes where countries meet their 2030 Paris Agreement nationally determined contributions (in orange), constrained estimates using socioeconomic factors

A listing of 25 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, January 12, 2025 thru Sat, January 18, 2025. This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks! Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Change Impacts Los Angeles burns: What you need to know  This is terrible. This is climate change. by Andrew Dessler, The Climate Brink, Jan 13, 2025

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park from the Gigafact team in collaboration with members from our team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Can CO2 be ignored because it’s just a trace gas? While carbon dioxide is a small part of the atmosphere, it has a large impact on climate as a greenhouse gas. Nitrogen and oxygen make up around 99% of the atmosphere, but neither traps heat. Les

Open access notables Long-term trends in heat wave gaps for the New York City metropolitan area, Lin & Colle, Urban Climate: Heat waves occurring in close succession to one another are hazardous because of the prolonged stress on the human body and energy demand. A heat wave gap metric, the time between two adjacent heat wave events, was utilized to examine the gap length and frequency trend for several stations around New York City (NYC) during the last several decades. From 1961 to 1990 to 1991–2020, the average heat wave gap for the various stations decreased by 15–41 %, the number of short gaps (≤5 days) increased by 33–300 %,

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Asheville, North Carolina, was once widely considered a climate haven thanks to its elevated, inland location and cooler temperatures than much of the Southeast. Then came the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Helene in September 2024. It was a stark reminder that nowhere is safe from climate-worsened extreme weather risks: Hurricanes arriving from the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic seaboard. Hail in the Midwest. Floods in the East. Sea level rise along the coasts. Wildfires in the West, most recently exemplified by the devastating and cos

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters and Bob Henson Flames from the Palisades Fire burn a building at Sunset Boulevard amid a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The fast-moving wildfire had destroyed thousands of structures and burned more than 15,000 acres by Thursday, January 9. (Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)