Tamil Nadu: Customs at Trichy Airport seize gold worth over Rs 1 crores from two passengers

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.

Plant biochemist Soichi Kojima and colleagues at Tohoku University discuss their findings and future plans about how gene and protein control systems that regulate the use of nitrogen by plant roots could help develop crops that require less nitrogenous fertilizers to produce acceptable yields.

Certain pesticides, particularly a class called neonicotinoids, are known to impact bees and other important insects, and are thought to be contributing to population declines. However, bees' reported responses to this threat across the world often seem to vary, suggesting other interacting factors are at play.

New research from geophysicists at the University of Leeds suggests that the way this super-hot core is cooled is key to understanding the causes of the peculiarities -- or anomalies, as scientists call them -- of the Earth's magnetic field.