Environment

Researchers have shown how carbon dioxide from industrial operations or even straight from the air can be gathered and converted into clean, sustainable fuels using just solar energy. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, developed a solar-powered reactor that converts captured CO2 and plastic waste into sustainable fuels and other valuable chemical products. In tests, CO2 was converted into syngas, a key building block for sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles were converted into glycolic acid, which is widely used in the cosmetics industry.

Plant roots are crucial in the uptake, selection, enrichment, and retention of a variety of mineral elements, which supply distant plant tissues with nutrients and sequesters excess metals. A variety of ion transporters found at roots mediate the absorption, efflux, and intracellular compartmentalization of various mineral elements to carry out such element-specific tasks.

Since technology has advanced so quickly over the last few decades, it is difficult to envision life without smartphones, GPS navigation systems, laptops, and other electronic devices.

In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and Cardiff University in the U.K. developed an early warning system that combines state-of-the-art acoustic technology with artificial intelligence to immediately classify earthquakes and determine potential tsunami risk.

The work was conducted in Del Mar, California, a beach town in San Diego County with infrastructure atop its coastal bluffs.

Oxygen concentration is an important measure of water quality because fish and other aquatic organisms require dissolved oxygen to breathe, according to Wei Zhi, assistant research professor of civil and environmental engineering and first author of the study, recently published in Nature Water.