News 2019

As the decade comes to an end, we reflect on the stories that spiked your interest and topped the 'most read articles' chart this year. Ranked by page views, here are your favourite stories of 2019: 10. Mystery arthritis-linked knee bone three times more common than 100 years ago Imperial News Is it time to adjust the official number of bones in the human body? In April, researchers found that the small fabella bone, once thought to be a relic of the past, has made a comeback over the last century.

Life as we know it requires phosphorus. It's one of the six main chemical elements of life, it forms the backbone of DNA and RNA molecules, acts as the main currency for energy in all cells and anchors the lipids that separate cells from their surrounding environment. But how did a lifeless environment on the early Earth supply this key ingredient? "For 50 years, what's called 'the phosphate problem,' has plagued studies on the origin of life,” said first author Jonathan Toner , a University of Washington research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.

Researchers at EPFL have patented a new concept that could cut trucks' CO2 emissions by almost 90%. It involves capturing CO2 within the exhaust system, converting it into a liquid and storing it on the vehicle. The liquid CO2 would then be delivered to a service station and where it will be turned back into fuel using renewable energy.

The year 2019 has certainly been a busy one at ETH. A new president took office and the second Sci-Tech Oscar was awarded, along with other major prizes, but there were also plenty of inventions and topics for discussion. The new year also ushered in a new era at ETH. The former director of PSI, Joël Mesot, took over the reins of the Executive Board as the new President of ETH Zurich with a sense of "great elation, drive and enthusiasm for this venerable institution".

The Bedfordshire town of Luton has come bottom of a league table of predicted city-wide air pollution concentrations among UK cities, according to new analysis by the Universities of Birmingham and Lancaster. Although Luton's air pollution emissions are about as expected for its population, the town's compactness limits dispersal of pollution, meaning it drops to last place among the 146 most populous UK places in terms of predicted air pollution concentrations.

The Bedfordshire town of Luton has come bottom of a league table of predicted city-wide air pollution concentrations among UK cities, according to new analysis by the Universities of Birmingham and Lancaster. Although Luton's air pollution emissions are about as expected for its population, the town's compactness limits dispersal of pollution, meaning it drops to last place among the 146 most populous UK places in terms of predicted air pollution concentrations.

Scientists have discovered remnants of the world's oldest fossil forest in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, New York. It is believed the extensive network of trees, which would have spread from New York all the way into Pennsylvania and beyond, is around 386 million years old. This makes the Cairo forest around 2 or 3 million years older than what was thought to be the world's oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State and around 40 km away from the Cairo site.

Led by UK Universities, multi-disciplinary researchers from around the globe are joining forces in an innovative new research centre aimed at speeding up the use of radical new cooling solutions to help small-holder farmers, medicine suppliers and others make the most of clean and sustainable chilled distribution systems.

The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth, and thanks to this, sea spray aerosols similar to what researchers see in California are being generated during the Arctic winter, according to a new University of Michigan study. Summertime Arctic sea ice cover is the second lowest on record, according to the Arctic report card 2019, produced by the National Snow and Ice Data Center, continuing its rapid decline over the past several decades.

As December winds down, we mark not just the end of another year of discovery at Caltech but the conclusion of a decade of remarkable accomplishments and research breakthroughs.

The effects of climate change are becoming increasingly noticeable and therefore a transformation of our energy system is becoming more and more urgent. The fight against climate change is a global challenge and the electricity sector plays a key role in this transformation process. The shift from conventional power plants to renewable energies and the increasing electricity consumption are just two of the manifold challenges.

As climate change accelerates, the oceans are rapidly acidifying. An innovative new study by University of Chicago biologists shows that mussels raised in an acidic experimental environment grew smaller shells than those grown at normal levels, but the overall survival rate of mussels grown under both conditions was the same.

Mealworms are not only able to eat various forms of plastic, as previous research has shown, they can consume potentially toxic plastic additives in Styrofoam with no ill effects, a new study shows. The worms can then be used as a safe, protein-rich feed supplement. Tiny mealworms may hold part of the solution to our giant plastics problem.

Technique may help remotely image and assess health of infants, burn victims, and accident survivors in hard-to-reach places. For most people, getting an ultrasound is a relatively easy procedure: As a technician gently presses a probe against a patient's skin, sound waves generated by the probe travel through the skin, bouncing off muscle, fat, and other soft tissues before reflecting back to the probe, which detects and translates the waves into an image of what lies beneath.

Method concentrates radionuclides in a small portion of a nuclear plant's wastewater, allowing the rest to be recycled. Nuclear power continues to expand globally, propelled, in part, by the fact that it produces few greenhouse gas emissions while providing steady power output. But along with that expansion comes an increased need for dealing with the large volumes of water used for cooling these plants, which becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes that require special long-term disposal.

People exposed to higher levels of air pollution are more likely to experience depression or die by suicide, finds a new analysis led by UCL. The first systematic review and meta-analysis of evidence connecting air pollution and a range of mental health problems, published in Environmental Health Perspectives , reviewed study data from 16 countries.

'Whoopi' the manta ray - a regular visitor to Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef - has helped University of Queensland and Murdoch University scientists study rays' impressive ability to heal. Whoopi, who has swum with thousands of tourists WA's over the years, was hit by a boat in 2015, suffering propeller cuts measuring up to 20 centimetres to the edge of her wing.

Channels McGill University News and Events How can predators coexist with their prey over long periods without the predators completely depleting the resource that keeps them alive? Experiments performed over a period of 10 years by researchers from McGill University and the Universities of Oldenburg and Potsdam have now confirmed that regular oscillations in predator-prey populations can persist over very long periods "Because predators eat thei

For many years, for all we knew, our solar system was alone in the universe. Then better telescopes began to reveal a treasure trove of planets circling distant stars. In 2014, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope handed scientists a smorgasbord of more than 700 brand-new distant planets to study-many of them unlike what we had previously seen.

Researchers from UNIGE and Uméå show that to resist stronger species, rare animal and plant species group together in ghettos to help each other, maintaining biodiversity. How can you survive when your species has few representatives' An international team of researchers, led by the Universities of Umeå (Sweden) and Geneva (UNIGE, Switzerland), demonstrates that animal and plant communities are organized into ethnic neighbourhoods, where species in low abundance come together to strengthen their persistence against more competitive species.