/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Billions upon billions of soot particles enter Earth's atmosphere each second, totaling about 5.8 million metric tons a year—posing a climate-warming impact previously estimated at almost one-third that of carbon dioxide. /news/2025-09-soot-climate-properties-hours-atmosphere.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 03 Sep 2025 13:25:04 EDT news676124701 Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is responsible for approximately 74.5% of the reduction in rainfall and 16.5% of the temperature increase in the biome during the dry season. For the first time, researchers have quantified the impact of vegetation loss and global climate change on the forest. /news/2025-09-deforestation-rainfall-temperatures-amazon-dry.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:22:05 EDT news676045321 About 71% of Earth's surface is covered by the vast oceans. When winds blow over the sea surface, they transfer energy to the water, creating waves. Some of these waves, under the force of strong winds, break and produce tiny airborne droplets that become sea spray aerosols. This process happens across all oceans and is one of the world's largest sources of aerosols. Despite decades of research, scientists still do not fully understand the impact on the planet's climate, especially how much they contribute to particles that form clouds, known as cloud condensation nuclei. /news/2025-08-sea-spray-aerosol-highlights-fundamental.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 28 Aug 2025 15:02:04 EDT news675612121 For decades, the Tijuana River has carried millions of gallons of untreated sewage and industrial waste across the U.S.-Mexico border. The river passes through San Diego's South Bay region before emptying into the ocean, recently leading to more than 1,300 consecutive days of beach closures and water quality concerns. /news/2025-08-tijuana-river-toxic-pollutes-air.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 28 Aug 2025 14:00:04 EDT news675517126 QUT researchers have advanced the understanding of how to create tiny seawater droplets to form mist plumes that reflect sunlight to protect coral reefs. /news/2025-08-droplet-dynamics-spray-technology-coral.html Ecology Biotechnology Wed, 27 Aug 2025 11:54:04 EDT news675514442 Environmental scientists are increasingly using enormous artificial intelligence models to make predictions about changes in weather and climate, but a new study by MIT researchers shows that bigger models are not always better. /news/2025-08-simpler-outperform-deep-climate.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 26 Aug 2025 12:04:05 EDT news675428641 Volcanoes that blast gases high into the atmosphere not only change global temperatures but also influence flooding in unusual ways, Princeton researchers have found. /news/2025-08-tropical-volcanic-eruptions-rainfall-equator.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 26 Aug 2025 09:02:04 EDT news675417721 A typical morning hair-care routine can expose you to as much immediate nanoparticle pollution as standing in dense highway traffic, report Purdue University engineers. /news/2025-08-styling-hair-products-billions-nanoparticles.html Environment Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:28:05 EDT news674926081 Heat waves—prolonged periods of abnormally hot weather—influence egg prices, energy bills and even public transit. And they're becoming more common as temperatures increase. /news/2025-08-africa-hotter-longer-years.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:37:05 EDT news674818621 A new wave of climate research is sounding a stark warning: Human activity may be driving drought more intensely—and more directly—than previously understood. /news/2025-08-climate-reveal-human-southwest-permanent.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:30:05 EDT news674314202 Researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) have published a paper in Communications Earth & Environment that demonstrates for the first time that using data gathered on atmospheric particles from Chinese megacities to characterize air quality for U.S. urban centers leads to significant inaccuracies. /news/2025-08-air-quality-derived-megacities-significant.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:56:04 EDT news674304961 Earth's atmosphere transports tiny forms of cellular life, such as fungal spores, pollen, bacteria, and viruses. On their journeys, these microorganisms encounter challenging conditions such as cold temperatures, UV radiation, and a lack of nutrient availability. /news/2025-08-microorganisms-earth-atmosphere-simply-survive.html Ecology Cell & Microbiology Thu, 07 Aug 2025 12:42:10 EDT news673789325 We all remember the advice frequently repeated during the COVID pandemic: maintain six feet of distance from every other human when waiting in a line to avoid transmitting the virus. While reasonable, the advice did not take into account the complicated fluid dynamics governing how the airborne particles actually travel through the air if people are also walking and stopping. Now, a team of researchers led by two undergraduate physics majors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has modeled how aerosol plumes spread when people are waiting and walking in a line. /news/2025-08-line-feet-social-distancing-airborne.html Soft Matter Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:00:04 EDT news673612981 A new study shows that natural dust particles swirling in from faraway deserts can trigger freezing of clouds in Earth's Northern Hemisphere. This subtle mechanism influences how much sunlight clouds reflect and how they produce rain and snow—with major implications for climate projections. /news/2025-07-particle-pattern-reveals-ice-formation.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:00:03 EDT news673171333 Ice crystals in Earth's atmosphere sometimes align just right to create various striking visual effects, from a halo around the moon, to bright spots called sundogs on either side of the sun in a winter sky, or a rainbowed pillar, called a crown flash, above a storm cloud. /news/2025-07-sun-dogs-celestial-effects-alien.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 30 Jul 2025 11:52:03 EDT news673095121 Heat waves are becoming more frequent around the world. And while rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions are part of the problem, the declining levels of aerosols—the small particles that make up smog and air pollution—may be driving the rise even more, particularly in populated areas. /news/2025-07-decline-aerosols-populated-areas.html Environment Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:27:33 EDT news671898447 Glaciers hold layers of history preserved in ice, offering unique insights into Earth's past that can also help us interpret the future. Trapped amidst the frozen water are microscopic deposits of dust, pollen, and even pollutants that scientists can use to examine environmental changes through time. /news/2025-07-scientists-ice-core-european-alps.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 16 Jul 2025 07:30:02 EDT news671868207 Current climate models have so far been unable to adequately reproduce the clouds over the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. An international team has now taken an important step toward filling this gap. The researchers were able to prove that the majority of ice nuclei in the atmosphere there are due to sugar compounds from marine microorganisms in the seawater. /news/2025-07-sugars-salty-ocean-responsible-large.html Environment Tue, 15 Jul 2025 10:50:08 EDT news671793102 Bubbles burst when their caps rupture. Children discover this phenomenon every summer day, but it also underpins key mechanisms for the spread of pollutants, contaminants, and even infectious disease through the generation of aerosol droplets. While bubble bursting has been extensively studied in pure substances, the impact of contaminants on bursting dynamics has not received widespread attention. /news/2025-07-theory-aerosol-droplets-contaminated-pollution.html Soft Matter Tue, 15 Jul 2025 03:32:04 EDT news671769119 The cleanup of air pollution in East Asia has accelerated global warming, a new study published today (Monday, 14 July) in the journal Communications Earth and Environment has found. /news/2025-07-air-pollution-east-asia-global.html Earth Sciences Environment Mon, 14 Jul 2025 05:00:02 EDT news671448431 A sneeze. Ocean currents. Smoke. What do these have in common? They're instances of turbulence: unpredictable, chaotic, uneven fluid flows of fluctuating velocity and pressure. Though ubiquitous in nature, these flows remain somewhat of a mystery, theoretically and computationally. /news/2025-07-mathematical-scaling-regimes-lagrangian-turbulence.html Mathematics Thu, 10 Jul 2025 04:49:52 EDT news671341786 In the late 2010s, when Assistant Professor Flavio Lehner worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, water managers often asked him about the drought in the Southwest. Was the low precipitation simply an unlucky draw in the cycle of long-term weather variations? What role did climate change play? Most importantly, was the drought there to stay? /news/2025-07-climate-aerosols-persistent-drought-rainfall.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 09 Jul 2025 12:28:04 EDT news671282881 A combination of sewage overflows and coastal winds could be sending billions of airborne microplastic particles into the world's coastal towns and cities, a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests. /news/2025-07-sewage-coastal-airborne-microplastics-cities.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 09 Jul 2025 06:51:04 EDT news671262661 Melting glaciers may be silently setting the stage for more explosive and frequent volcanic eruptions in the future, according to research on six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes. /news/2025-07-glaciers-trigger-explosive-eruptions-globally.html Earth Sciences Environment Mon, 07 Jul 2025 19:00:03 EDT news670759292 Yale University ecologists reveal a lizard lineage that rode out the dinosaur-killing asteroid event with unexpected evolutionary survival traits. Night lizards (family Xantusiidae) survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event 66 million years ago (formerly known as the K-T extinction) despite having small broods and occupying limited ranges, a departure from the theory of how other species are thought to have persisted in the aftermath of the event. /news/2025-06-night-lizards-survived-asteroid-dinosaurs.html Evolution Paleontology & Fossils Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:40:01 EDT news670239608 Urea is considered a possible key molecule in the origin of life. ETH researchers have discovered a previously unknown way in which this building block can form spontaneously on aqueous surfaces without the need for any additional energy. /news/2025-06-mist-sea-spray-unique-conditions.html Materials Science Thu, 26 Jun 2025 15:52:20 EDT news670171933 For more than a century, a patch of cold water south of Greenland has resisted the Atlantic Ocean's overall warming, fueling debate among scientists. A new study identifies the cause as the long-term weakening of a major ocean circulation system. /news/2025-06-strange-atlantic-cold-ocean-slowdown.html Earth Sciences Environment Sat, 21 Jun 2025 06:30:02 EDT news669705863 As Earth's largest carbon reservoir, the ocean locks carbon away from the atmosphere. However, scientists still struggle to measure and monitor exactly how much carbon is stored in the ocean, hindering efforts to model and respond to our changing climate. /news/2025-06-marine-clues-export-carbon-deep.html Earth Sciences Environment Thu, 19 Jun 2025 14:23:04 EDT news669561781 The central estimate of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C is 130 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) (from the beginning of 2025). This would be exhausted in a little more than three years at current levels of CO2 emissions, according to the latest Indicators of Global Climate Change study published in the journal Earth System Science Data, and the budget for 1.6°C or 1.7°C could be exceeded within nine years. /news/2025-06-global-carbon-emissions-track-exhaust.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 18 Jun 2025 19:00:01 EDT news669460501 Researchers at Boise State University have developed a stable, high-performance Ti3C2Tx MXene ink formulation optimized for aerosol jet printing—paving the way for scalable manufacturing of micro-supercapacitors, sensors, and other energy storage and harvesting devices. /news/2025-06-energy-storage-future-mxene-inks.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:51:00 EDT news669307850