2+ day, 8+ hour ago (384+ words) A new film that can be made from widely-available food waste is as effective as conventional plastics at shielding food from moisture and oxygen, its inventors say." The novel material was made by combining cellulose from wood pulp and chitin from crustacean shells or mushrooms, and builds on the team's previous research to develop an alternative to petroleum-based plastic that can extend the shelflife of fresh produce." In their ten years of work so far, they have made progress, developing materials that have become successively stronger and less permeable. However, they've battled to overcome one significant hurdle, which is that as humidity rises, the material they've invented becomes more permeable to both oxygen and water, threatening the contents within." Most strikingly, their experiments showed that at humidity levels of 80%reminiscient of some tropical countriesthe biobased film was even less permeable…...

4+ day, 8+ hour ago (582+ words) The hills of Kentucky might seem like a separate world from the Selva Maya rainforest in Central America. But they are just a song away. When someone hears the twitter of the tiny Kentucky warbler in the woods of Appalachia, the sounds are inextricably linked to what's happening to this imperiled jungle in southern Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. That connection, spanning thousands of kilometers, is being highlighted by scientists who used amateur bird sightings to illuminate the ties between birds that capture the hearts of North American birders and Central and South American forests threatened by deforestation. "If we lose the last great forests of Central America'and we are'we lose the birds that define our eastern forests in North America," said Jeremy Radachowsky, an ecologist involved in the new research as head of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Mesoamerica program. The…...

5+ day, 7+ hour ago (434+ words) In other words, the strain EVs place on the grid is not just from the massive need for power, it's from the chaos triggered by unpredictable and constantly fluctuating demand at charging stations. A new study points to an unexpectedly elegant fix: add a device called a distribution static compensator (D-STATCOM). These gadgets aren't new, and they definitely aren't cheap, but they excel at one thing EV stations desperately need'switching between power source and power sink on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis to catch wild swings in demand before they cause trouble. To test the device's potential, researchers constructed a computer simulation of a 180 kilowatt (kW) commercial charging station with a 15 kW base load and 15 charging guns drawing 11 kW each. They modeled a fleet of EVs arriving randomly throughout the day, in line with the real-world unpredictability of driver behavior. They pitted…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago (403+ words) Millions of people around the world lack access to clean potable water, a problem that is only getting worse with rising temperatures and a growing population. Yet, the atmosphere contains six times more water than all the fresh water in rivers, according to scientists" estimates. Researchers have developed several sponge-like materials to capture this water vapor from air. But a new ultrasonic device developed by a team from MIT promises to do it 45 times faster using minimal energy. They presented the concept in the journal Nature Communications. Atmospheric water harvesting systems typically rely on sorbent materials that take up water from air. But they have a difficult time letting that water go because of the bonds between the water molecules and the sorbent material. Today"s systems use the sun or electricity to heat up the sorbents in order to…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago (584+ words) Beavers have recently enjoyed a makeover as ecological heroes. Their dams and ponds, once destroyed as a pesky source of flooding, are now hailed as water-cleansing oases that do everything from harbor fish to buffer the landscape from wildfires. But less has been said about their effects on terrestrial creatures in the surrounding land. It turns out the effects of these paddle-tailed rodents extends well beyond the water's edge. Recent research by two separate groups of scientists in Europe shows that beavers are a boon to a host of winged creatures ranging from bats to tiny flies. The new findings have researchers declaring: Bring on the beavers (and their ponds). "Our work adds further important evidence of the beneficial effects of beaver wetlands for wildlife," said Patrick Cook, an ecologist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom. The…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago (545+ words) It is challenging to communicate "neutrally," especially when discussing predictions about future events," says study team member Marie Juanchich, a psychologist at the University of Essex in the UK. Information is inevitably framed either positively (highlighting the possibility of something happening) or negatively (emphasizing the chance that it might not)." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prescribes standardized terms for communicating about the probability of different events. At the low end of the scale, the organization mandates negative terms. For example, something with a less than 33% chance of occurring should be described as unlikely." In the new study, Juanchich and her collaborators conducted eight online experiments involving a total of 4,150 people, asking them to evaluate statements about climate change that used either negative (saying something is unlikely" to occur) or positive (saying that something has a small probability or…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago (444+ words) An investigation into organic apple orchards in Australia has made a surprising discovery: their soils are remarkably similar to those of conventional orchards, where organic farming techniques aren't used." This suggests that organic food labels don't always indicate ecological conditions that are superior to the rest. The findings were based on soil samples taken from eight orchards in South Australia in 2023. Half of these were farmed conventionally, while the other half had been under certified organic management for seven years or more, involving a different approach to fertilizers and pesticides, among other things." The researchers expected this to be reflected in the soil profiles, and they had two main assumptions here: that the organic orchards would have greater soil diversity and abundance than conventional orchards, and that organic soils would be closer to samples taken from unfarmed native soils in…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago (519+ words) After water, concrete is the most-used material in the world. And now, researchers have given this ubiquitous building material super powers. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team has found a way to make a type of concrete that can store and release electricity. This means that the concrete walls and sidewalks around us could double as giant batteries, powering lights and devices. About 5 cubic meters of the electron-conducting concrete'the volume of a typical basement wall'can hold enough energy to meet the daily needs of an average American household. The MIT researchers presented their advance in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Buildings use over a third of the world's energy and account for 40 percent of carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. The concrete used to make these buildings is responsible for a big chunk of carbon emissions....

2+ week, 4+ day ago (443+ words) We've poured more than 150 million metric tons of plastic garbage into the ocean since 1950. Plastic bits have turned up in places as remote as the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where scientists recently found an intact plastic bag some 6 kilometers below the ocean surface. So it should come as no surprise that life in the deep has figured out how to extract carbon " a building block of life " from even this seemingly indestructible material. Scientists have discovered ocean bacteria with genes suggesting they are equipped to break down and eat plastic. "In the ocean, where carbon is scarce, microbes seem to have fine-tuned these enzymes to make use of this new, human-made carbon source: plastic," said Carlos Duarte, a marine ecologist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. This isn't the first time plastic-eating microbes have…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (574+ words) Trash that would otherwise rot in landfills could be converted into 62.5 billion liters of jet fuel per year, with a carbon footprint 80-90% smaller than that of fossil-based aviation fuel, according to a new study (1). Aviation represents 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is extremely hard to decarbonize. One potential solution is sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) made from renewable feedstocks. But some of these feedstocks come with their own problems " biofuel crops can displace natural ecosystems or food crops, for example. That has produced a surge of interest in making fuel from various forms of waste. "There is a wealth of organic waste deserving our attention," says study team member Michael McElroy, professor of environmental studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Using these wastes as feedstocks could reduce the cost of the decarbonization transition for hard-to-abate sectors." Municipal solid waste…...