All posts tagged: Green Good News

Researchers turn sunlight and CO2 into living biomass

Researchers turn sunlight and CO2 into living biomass

Published by Jenni Sidey

Carbon dioxide has long looked more like waste than resource. A new solar reactor turns it into living bacterial biomass using sunlight, enzymes and engineered E. coli, offering an early glimpse of factories that could directly make materials from air. Plants have quietly mastered one of nature’s greatest tricks for hundreds of millions of years. Using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, they create life. Now, scientists in the United Kingdom have taken an important step toward recreating part of that process using engineered bacteria and solar-powered chemistry. Researchers led by Dr. Lin Su at Queen Mary University of London have developed an integrated solar reactor that uses sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into living bacterial biomass. The work, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, combines solar technology, enzymes and engineered Escherichia coli, commonly called E. coli, inside a single liquid-filled device. The system mimics key parts of photosynthesis without using plants, algae or naturally photosynthetic microbes. Instead, it relies on a carefully designed combination of chemistry and biology working together in one …

Scientists solve the 30-year mystery of ‘clockwork’ earthquakes

Scientists solve the 30-year mystery of ‘clockwork’ earthquakes

Published by Jenni Sidey

Deep beneath the Pacific, one undersea fault has produced nearly identical magnitude 6 earthquakes every few years for decades. Researchers now think strange, water-soaked barrier zones inside the fault act like natural brakes, stopping ruptures in place and raising bigger questions worldwide. A fault line deep under the eastern Pacific has been doing something earthquakes rarely do: repeating itself. About 1,000 miles west of Ecuador, the Gofar transform fault has produced magnitude 6 earthquakes every five to six years, again and again, on nearly the same patches of seafloor. The shocks tend to start in familiar places, reach familiar sizes, and then stop in familiar places. For earthquake scientists, that kind of regularity is almost unsettling. Now a study in Science argues that the answer lies in stretches of the fault once treated as quiet gaps. These zones, lodged between the patches that repeatedly rupture, appear to act as durable barriers that keep earthquakes from growing larger. “We’ve known these barriers existed for a long time, but the question has always been, what are they …

Ancient fossils suggest complex life got its start on an oxygenated seafloor

Ancient fossils suggest complex life got its start on an oxygenated seafloor

Published by Jenni Sidey

Early eukaryotes, the lineage that later gave rise to animals, plants and fungi, may have depended on oxygen from the start. However, they mostly stayed on the seafloor. That narrow habitat could help explain why complex life took so long to spread widely. The oldest widely accepted eukaryote fossils come from seas that were anything but inviting. Oxygen was scarce, the chemistry of the water shifted from place to place, and much of the ocean floor remained hostile to complex organisms. Yet in that patchwork world, a crucial branch of life appears to have found its footing. A study in Nature argues that some of the earliest known eukaryotes, organisms in the domain that later gave rise to animals, plants and fungi, were already tied to oxygen between about 1.75 billion and 1.4 billion years ago. Moreover, the fossils also point to a more grounded lifestyle than many scientists had assumed. These organisms seem to have lived on or within the seafloor, not drifting freely as plankton in the water above. That picture matters because …

Why flowering plants survived Earth’s greatest extinction while dinosaurs did not

Why flowering plants survived Earth’s greatest extinction while dinosaurs did not

Published by Jenni Sidey

Flowering plants survived Earth’s worst disasters, including the asteroid strike that ended the dinosaurs, while many others vanished. A sweeping genomic analysis suggests ancient DNA doubling may have helped them endure upheaval, opening a new window on resilience in a warming world. Sixty-six million years ago, a giant asteroid slammed into Earth and changed life forever. The impact wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and devastated ecosystems across the planet. Fires spread, sunlight dimmed and food chains collapsed. Yet somehow, many flowering plants survived. A new study from Ghent University suggests those survivors may have carried a hidden advantage deep inside their DNA. Researchers found that many flowering plants endured ancient climate catastrophes after accidentally duplicating their entire genomes. The findings come from one of the largest analyses ever conducted on flowering plant genomes. Scientists studied 470 species and traced ancient genome duplication events across more than 100 million years of plant evolution. Their results revealed a striking pattern. Many successful genome duplications appeared during periods of severe environmental turmoil, including mass extinctions, rapid warming events …

Geophysicists solve the mystery of a 75-year-old ‘gravity hole’ in the Indian Ocean

Geophysicists solve the mystery of a 75-year-old ‘gravity hole’ in the Indian Ocean

Published by Jenni Sidey

South of India, the ocean surface slumps into one of Earth’s strangest depressions, a gravity hole so deep it has puzzled geophysicists for decades. Now a new reconstruction points to a buried plume of hot mantle rock, but not where anyone expected. The Indian Ocean looks flat from above, but one part of it sits far lower than it should. South of India, the sea surface dips so deeply that scientists have spent decades trying to explain what could pull it down. This feature, known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low, covers about 1.2 million square miles. In that region, the ocean surface lies roughly 106 meters lower than surrounding areas because gravity there is weaker. It is the lowest geoid anomaly on Earth, and for years it has stood out as one of the planet’s hardest geophysical puzzles. Seen from space, Earth appears smooth and round. It is not. Mass is spread unevenly inside the planet, and those buried differences slightly alter gravity from place to place. If the oceans were stripped of tides …

White hydrogen found in billion-year-old Canadian rock could fuel clean energy production

White hydrogen found in billion-year-old Canadian rock could fuel clean energy production

Published by Jenni Sidey

Deep beneath northern Ontario, some of Earth’s oldest rocks are quietly giving off hydrogen. At Kidd Creek mine near Timmins, geochemists tracked gas seeping from boreholes drilled two to nearly three kilometers below the surface. What they found was not a one-off puff or a short-lived flare. The hydrogen kept coming, in measurable amounts, over months. In some cases, it lasted for more than a decade. That matters because hydrogen already plays a central role in modern industry, especially in fertilizer, methanol, and steel production. Yet most of it still comes from fossil fuels or other energy-intensive processes. The new work suggests some of that supply might instead come straight from the crust. This would be possible in places where the right rocks already lie under active mining districts. Researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa report that all 35 boreholes they analyzed at Kidd Creek released hydrogen. Across the dataset, the average discharge came to 0.008 tonnes per borehole per year. When extrapolated across the mine’s 14,801 boreholes, that works …

Rechargeable solar battery ‘bottles the Sun’ for a rainy day or a cold night

Rechargeable solar battery ‘bottles the Sun’ for a rainy day or a cold night

Published by Jenni Sidey

Solar panels stop working when the sky goes dark. That simple fact has pushed energy researchers into a stubborn problem: how to hang on to the sun’s power once the light is gone. At UC Santa Barbara, scientists say they have built a molecule that does exactly that, not by storing electricity, but by packing solar energy into chemical bonds and holding it there until heat is needed. The work, published in Science, centers on a modified organic compound called pyrimidone, which can absorb sunlight, shift into a high-energy form, and later snap back, releasing heat on demand. The idea belongs to a field known as molecular solar thermal energy storage, or MOST. Instead of routing solar energy into large battery packs or the power grid, MOST systems store that energy directly inside a material. “We typically describe it as a rechargeable solar battery,” said Han Nguyen, a doctoral student in the Han Group and the study’s lead author. “It stores sunlight, and it can be recharged.” Nguyen said the team thinks of the process …

Can geoengineering save the Amazon Rainforest?

Can geoengineering save the Amazon Rainforest?

Published by Jenni Sidey

As the planet heats up and climate warnings grow more urgent, scientists are studying ideas that once sounded like science fiction. One of the most controversial involves changing the sky itself. A new study from the University of Exeter suggests that a climate engineering technique called stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI, could help protect the Amazon rainforest from severe climate damage. Using advanced climate models, researchers found that artificially cooling the planet may allow the rainforest to store more carbon and remain more productive, even under extremely high carbon dioxide levels. The findings, published in the journal Earth System Dynamics, arrive at a moment of growing concern for the Amazon. Scientists increasingly fear that rising temperatures and deforestation could push the rainforest toward large-scale dieback, threatening one of the planet’s most important carbon sinks. “Surprisingly, in these three scenarios, we find that the Amazon rainforest is most productive in the scenario with SAI geoengineering,” said co-author Professor Peter Cox, Director of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. Maps showing the anomaly in the land carbon flux due …

AI egg scanners make poultry hatcheries more humane

AI egg scanners make poultry hatcheries more humane

Published by Jenni Sidey

Eggs may look simple from the outside, but each one can hold valuable information about life, health and future production. For hatcheries, that hidden information matters. A single egg may contain a healthy embryo, a dead embryo, an unfertilized yolk or a chick that will later be culled after hatching. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working to make that hidden world visible without cracking the shell. Their studies use near infrared imaging, hyperspectral imaging and machine learning to evaluate eggs quickly and safely. The goal is to help hatcheries improve production while reducing waste, disease risk and animal welfare concerns. The work could change how the poultry industry handles millions of eggs. Instead of relying on slow, labor-heavy checks, hatcheries may one day scan eggs automatically. A computer model could then identify which eggs are viable, which embryos have died and even which eggs contain male or female embryos. Seeing Inside Eggs Without Breaking Them Traditional egg testing often requires breaking eggs or relying on visual inspection. Hatcheries commonly use candling, which …

Antarctic meltwater is driving faster ice loss than climate models predict

Antarctic meltwater is driving faster ice loss than climate models predict

Published by Jenni Sidey

The usual picture of Antarctic ice loss is simple enough: a warmer atmosphere melts more ice, and the oceans rise. This new research argues that the real story is less straightforward, and potentially more dangerous. What melts off the ice does not just disappear into the sea as extra water. It changes the sea itself. In the new analysis, freshwater from Antarctica alters the density and circulation of the surrounding ocean in ways that can either speed up melting or briefly slow it, depending on where it happens. That means the ocean is not just responding to climate change. In some places, it is helping drive the next round of ice loss. Madeleine Youngs of the University of Maryland and her colleagues found that this meltwater feedback accounts for a surprisingly large share of future Antarctic ice-shelf melt in their simulations. In the experiments, direct climate forcing produced about one-third of the total melt increase, while the feedback tied to meltwater and ocean circulation accounted for the other two-thirds. “Most current climate models that inform …