All posts tagged: Green Good News

Worker bees help choose the next queen in bumble bee colonies

Worker bees help choose the next queen in bumble bee colonies

Published by Jenni Sidey

A baby bumble bee can end up on one of two very different paths. It can grow into a small worker that never reproduces, or become a large future queen built to survive winter and start a colony of her own. New research suggests that split is not dictated mainly by the queen. Instead, it is dictated by the workers doing the feeding. In Bombus impatiens, a common North American bumble bee, Penn State researchers found that worker bees help determine larval fate by passing along juvenile hormone in the food they make from nectar and pollen. In particular, larvae that received enough of that hormone during a narrow window late in development were far more likely to become queens. The finding shifts the picture of colony life. Rather than a top-down social order controlled by a single monarch, the study points to a more distributed system. In this system, caregivers can shape the colony’s future. “Since all these females share the same DNA, it’s a striking example of how the same genotype can produce …

Scientists discover a major geological rift tearing India in two

Scientists discover a major geological rift tearing India in two

Published by Jenni Sidey

Beneath the Himalayas, the Indian Plate is doing something geologists once thought continents largely avoided: it is coming apart. That slow collision between India and Asia has been pushing up the world’s highest mountains for about 60 million years. But far below the peaks, the descending plate is not moving as one solid slab. New seismic evidence suggests that in parts of southern Tibet, the plate’s dense lower section is peeling away from the crust above it, while another section may be torn along a steep boundary underground. The result is a far more complicated picture of continental collision than the textbook version. Instead of a single, clean geometry, researchers now see a patchwork of intact plate, delaminated plate, mantle upwelling, and possible slab tearing, all packed beneath the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. “We didn’t know continents could behave this way and that is, for solid earth science, pretty fundamental,” says Douwe van Hinsbergen, a geodynamicist at Utrecht University. By sampling helium gases in hundreds of springs across southern Tibet, researchers identified places where …

Study reveals hidden role of permafrost in ancient climate change

Study reveals hidden role of permafrost in ancient climate change

Published by Jenni Sidey

For decades, scientists have looked to the oceans for answers about one of Earth’s biggest climate mysteries: Why did atmospheric carbon dioxide rise so dramatically as the planet emerged from the last Ice Age? A new study from the University of Gothenburg suggests the answer may lie much closer to home, buried beneath frozen ground that stretched across vast areas of the Northern Hemisphere. The research indicates that thawing permafrost released enormous amounts of stored carbon as temperatures climbed after the last Ice Age. According to the study, those emissions may have accounted for nearly half of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the transition from a frozen world to the warmer climate humans know today. The findings offer a fresh perspective on how natural climate systems worked in the past. They also raise concerns about what could happen as modern warming accelerates the thawing of today’s permafrost regions. Reconstructed biome distributions at 0, 6, and 21 ka. (CREDIT: Science Advances) Revisiting a Long-Held Climate Theory For many years, scientists believed the oceans were …

Scientists turn carbon dioxide into renewable methane using microbes

Scientists turn carbon dioxide into renewable methane using microbes

Published by Jenni Sidey

As wind turbines spin and solar panels soak up sunlight, one major problem continues to shadow the clean energy transition: storing energy for long periods of time. Batteries can help for hours or even days, but seasonal storage remains far more difficult. Researchers at Penn State now believe tiny microbes could help solve part of that challenge. An international team led by Bruce Logan, director of Penn State’s Institute of Energy and the Environment, has developed a larger and more efficient reactor that converts carbon dioxide and renewable electricity into methane, the main component of natural gas. Their findings show that microbial electrosynthesis systems can scale up dramatically without losing performance. The work offers a possible pathway for storing renewable energy in chemical form while reusing carbon dioxide that would otherwise enter the atmosphere. A graphical abstract of the study. (CREDIT: Water Research) “Traditionally, large-scale, long-term storage means pumping water uphill and letting it flow back down through turbines,” Logan said. “If you’re talking seasonal storage, you really need to put that energy into a …

First-ever amber discovery in Antarctica reveals lost prehistoric rainforest

First-ever amber discovery in Antarctica reveals lost prehistoric rainforest

Published by Jenni Sidey

Amber usually brings to mind tropical forests, trapped insects, and warm landscapes. That is what makes the new Antarctic find so striking. Buried beneath the Amundsen Sea, tiny resin fragments now suggest that about 90 million years ago, near the South Pole, swampy conifer forests were growing in a much warmer world. The material is the first fossil resin ever reported from Antarctica. Researchers found it in a thin lignite layer at the top of a roughly 3-meter-long carbonaceous mudstone sequence of mid-Cretaceous age, recovered from the Pine Island trough in West Antarctica. The core came from Site PS104_20, at 73.57° south and 107.09° west, in 946 meters of water. It was drilled from the seafloor in early 2017 during RV Polarstern Expedition PS104 using the MARUM-MeBo70 seafloor drill rig. Until now, amber had been described from every continent except Antarctica. Southern Hemisphere continental configuration ~90 million years ago, including sites of southernmost amber finds: the ‘Otway amber’ (green cross; Quinney et al.2015), the Tupuangi amber (yellow cross; Mays et al.2017) and the ‘Pine Island …

New low-temperature process extracts battery-grade lithium with far less waste and energy

New low-temperature process extracts battery-grade lithium with far less waste and energy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Lithium sits at the center of the battery economy. Yet getting it out of rock still looks surprisingly crude. Spodumene, the world’s most common lithium-bearing hard rock, is usually blasted with heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius. After that, acids and other chemicals pull out the metal. What remains is largely waste. That old route has helped China dominate lithium refining. Even though countries like the United States and Australia hold large lithium resources of their own, China still leads the industry. Additionally, it has made hard-rock lithium more expensive than lithium drawn from brines. Yet brine extraction can place environmental strain on water-stressed regions. A team led by researchers from MIT now says it has found a way around one of the industry’s central bottlenecks. Specifically, the challenge is how to crack open hard rock without the punishing heat, heavy waste, and long chain of cleanup steps that define conventional refining. In a paper published in Science, the group describes a low-temperature, closed-loop process that extracts battery-grade lithium salts from spodumene. It also recovers alumina …

The world’s largest fungus is hiding in Oregon’s Blue Mountains — and its really big

The world’s largest fungus is hiding in Oregon’s Blue Mountains — and its really big

Published by Jenni Sidey

In Oregon’s Blue Mountains, patches of dying trees once looked like separate outbreaks, scattered across ridges and drainages as if disease had struck at random. Instead, scientists found something far stranger beneath the soil: many of those distant pockets belonged to the same fungus. That fungus, Armillaria ostoyae, covered about 9.65 square kilometers, making it the largest known individual fungus on Earth at the time of the study. It had likely been growing there for at least 1,900 years, and possibly as long as 8,650. For researchers, the discovery did more than set a record. It challenged a basic biological idea: what counts as an individual. “It’s one organism that began as a microscopic spore and then grew vegetatively, like a plant,” said Dr. Catherine Parks, a research plant pathologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and coordinator of the team. “From a broad scientific view, it challenges what we think of as an individual organism.” Scientists say their DNA tests prove that a single Armillaria organism covers nearly 3 1/2 square miles …

Microplastics may be weakening the ocean’s ability to fight climate change

Microplastics may be weakening the ocean’s ability to fight climate change

Published by Jenni Sidey

The ocean works quietly every day to protect life on Earth. It absorbs heat from the atmosphere, stores massive amounts of carbon dioxide and produces much of the oxygen humans breathe. Much of that work depends on organisms so small they cannot be seen with the naked eye. These microscopic marine algae, called phytoplankton, drift near the ocean’s sunlit surface. Despite their tiny size, they carry out nearly half of all photosynthesis on Earth. They absorb carbon dioxide, use sunlight for energy and help move carbon deep into the ocean through a process known as carbon sequestration. Tiny plastic fragments have spread across nearly every marine environment, from crowded coastlines to remote Arctic waters. Scientists already knew these particles could harm marine life. The new research suggests they may also weaken the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The researchers found that the impact of plastic on CO2 uptake was greatest in dry and tropical climate regions. These regions are particularly vulnerable to microplastic pollution. (CREDIT: Francesca Verones, NTNU) “The ocean plays a …

Nearly 50% of all cotton T-shirts are wasted before purchase

Nearly 50% of all cotton T-shirts are wasted before purchase

Published by Jenni Sidey

Most debates about textile waste start at the closet, or at the donation bin. But a closer look at a basic cotton T-shirt suggests the biggest losses may happen long before a shirt is worn, washed, or thrown away. In a new analysis of two consecutive T-shirt life cycles, researchers found that about 44 percent of the original cotton fiber was lost during production, before the garment ever reached a store. Under current conditions, only about 17 percent of the initial fiber input could be mechanically recovered and used again in a new T-shirt. That finding shifts attention away from the usual end-of-life discussion and toward the factory floor. Here, spinning, dyeing, cutting, and sewing quietly erase a large share of the material that goes into clothing. “When we talk about textile waste, the debate often focuses on the clothes we throw away. But the problem starts much earlier,” explained former master’s student Rakib Ahmed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), currently a researcher at SINTEF Industry. System boundary of the study …

Reusable brick walls could slash construction carbon emissions by 60%

Reusable brick walls could slash construction carbon emissions by 60%

Published by Jenni Sidey

Brick construction creates lasting materials but often ends in waste when buildings are torn down early. Engineers in Austria built reusable brick walls that can be dismantled and rebuilt, cutting emissions and debris while suggesting a different future for buildings. Construction sites often begin with new materials and end with massive piles of waste. Across the world, buildings are demolished long before the materials inside them wear out. Brick walls that could last for generations are frequently crushed and discarded after only a few decades of use. Researchers at Graz University of Technology believe that cycle needs to change. Working with Austrian brick producer wienerberger, the team has developed reusable brick wall systems designed to survive beyond the life of a single building. Instead of binding bricks together permanently with mortar, the researchers created industrially prefabricated wall elements connected through reversible joints. The walls can later be dismantled without destroying the materials, then rebuilt at another site. The project, called Re-Use Ziegelwand, could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and construction waste while giving buildings a …