news 2022

Longread Can minerals help extract the greenhouse gas CO2 from the air? PhD candidate Emily te Pas is investigating the potential of spreading crushed silicate minerals on agricultural land. 'This is still pioneering at this stage. It is important to collect data: does it work and is it safe?'' Photo above: Marcel van den Bergh At a testing site in Renkum, PhD candidate Emily te Pas is investigating whether the greenhouse gas CO2 can be extracted from the air by adding silicate minerals to agricultural soil.

A toxin which makes pigs vomit is the surprising key which has unlocked the century-old mystery of the origins of a Martian meteorite, and the possible identity of the Black student who discovered it. In 1931, an unusual stone stored in the geological collection of Purdue University in the USA was identified as a pristine example of a meteorite - a piece of space rock blasted from the surface of Mars millions of years ago before being pulled into the Earth's atmosphere.

Scientists have systematically mapped and sampled 'green doughnuts' for the first time since the seascape lurking at the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef was discovered in the 1970s - revealing an ecosystem teeming with life. In this multidisciplinary study of the area, under a fact-finding project named HALO , a team of Australian and international scientists set out aboard the CSIRO research vessel RV Investigator to understand how these sometimes near-perfect rings formed over the past 12,000 years of the Holocene, their importance as reef habitats and their role in cycling chemicals.

Astronomers have found a way to determine an asteroid's interior structure based on how its spin changes during a close encounter with Earth. NASA hit a bullseye in late September with DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which flew a spacecraft straight at the heart of a nearby asteroid. The one-way kamikaze mission smashed into the stadium-sized space rock and successfully reset the asteroid's orbit.

In many regions of the world, groundwater is contaminated with arsenic of natural origin. The harmful substance can be filtered out of water with the help of iron. researchers have for the first time made visible exactly what happens in this process in a new type of experimental set-up. When metallic iron corrodes, i.e. rusts, iron oxides are formed that can strongly bind pollutants such as arsenic.

For the first time, zinc isotope ratios in tooth enamel have been analysed with the aim of identifying the diet of a Neanderthal. Other chemical tracers indicate that this individual did not consume the blood of their prey, but ate the bone marrow without consuming the bones. A new study published on october 17th in the journal PNAS , led by a CNRS researcher, has for the first time used zinc isotope analysis to determine the position of Neanderthals in the food chain.

An analysis of obsidian artifacts excavated during the 1960s at two prominent archaeological sites in southwestern Iran suggests that the networks Neolithic people formed in the region as they developed agriculture are larger and more complex than previously believed, according to a new study by Yale researchers.

Oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere are likely to have -fluctuated wildly- one billion years ago, creating conditions that could have accelerated-the development of early animals, say researchers. Scientists believe atmospheric oxygen-developed in three stages, starting with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event-around two billion years ago, when oxygen first appeared in the-atmosphere.

Researchers led by Göttingen University use earthquake sensors to track magnitude and velocity of 2021 summer flood Rapidly evolving floods are a major and growing hazard worldwide. Currently, their onset and evolution is hard to identify using existing systems. However, seismic sensors already in place to detect earthquakes could be a solution to this problem.

Measurements from EMIT, the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, will improve computer simulations researchers use to understand climate change. NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation ( EMIT ) mission aboard the International Space Station has produced its first mineral maps, providing detailed images that show the composition of the surface in regions of northwest Nevada and Libya in the Sahara Desert.

A study reveals how the Sigillaria brardii species —a fossil plant typical of peatlands and abundant in the flora of Europe and North America during the Upper Carboniferous— colonised new areas in the riverbeds of the great European mountain range known as the Variscan mountains, far from their natural habitat.

New research makes hypotheses that NASA's Europa Clipper can test: Any plumes or volcanic activity at the Jovian moon's surface are caused by shallow lakes in its icy crust. In the search for life beyond Earth, subsurface bodies of water in our outer solar system are some of the most important targets.

Groundwaters that circulate through the subsoil as a result of the melting permafrost can transport carbon dioxide and methane —gases with a strong greenhouse effect— to Arctic lakes and this increases the effects of climate change. This process of transporting gases to the lakes, which culminates with their emission into the atmosphere, is now quantified for the first time in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications .

Electric charge released into fog changes how water droplets behave, first-of-its-kind research from the universities of Bath and Reading has revealed. Real world experiments have demonstrated that releasing charge led to detectable changes in the size and number of fog droplets. The new results are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters .

Could the interface between art and science be more than just a source of inspiration and instead be used to unlock new scientific approaches? Art and science may seem light years apart, but according to a team of civil engineers they're simply different ways of making sense of the world. A new paper led by University of Sydney Professor of Civil Engineering , Itai Einav posits that the interface between art and science is not only a source of inspiration - it can be used to unlock new scientific approaches and transform research, potentially leading to new insights.

Swirling waters replenish nutrients in open ocean, a new study finds, and could mitigate some climate change effects. Subtropical gyres are enormous rotating ocean currents that generate sustained circulations in the Earth's subtropical regions just to the north and south of the equator. These gyres are slow-moving whirlpools that circulate within massive basins around the world, gathering up nutrients, organisms, and sometimes trash, as the currents rotate from coast to coast.

Forecasters are predicting a - three-peat La Niña - this year. This will be the third winter in a row that the Pacific Ocean has been in a La Niña cycle, something that's happened only twice before in records going back to 1950. New research led by the University of Washington offers a possible explanation.

New Curtin University-led research has found that the world's next supercontinent, Amasia, will most likely form when the Pacific Ocean closes in 200 to 300 million years. Published in National Science Review , the research team used a supercomputer to simulate how a supercontinent forms and found that because the Earth has been cooling for billions of years, the thickness and strength of the plates under the oceans reduce with time, making it difficult for the next supercontinent to assemble by closing the "young" oceans, such as the Atlantic or Indian oceans.

The intensity and rate of melt during the penultimate ice melting was much higher than previously thought, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications . According to conclusions of the study, in this climate change scenario, the instability of marine-based ice sheets —those that flow directly into the ocean— was instrumental in accelerating global warming.

A Curtin-led research team has found asteroid impacts on the Moon millions of years ago coincided precisely with some of the largest meteorite impacts on Earth, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The study also found that major impact events on Earth were not stand-alone events, but were accompanied by a series of smaller impacts, shedding new light on asteroid dynamics in the inner solar system, including the likelihood of potentially devastating Earth-bound asteroids.