articles

McMaster researchers are investigating how lead poisoning affected human health in the Roman Empire.

The research, jointly led by Tracy Prowse, an associate professor in McMaster's Department of Anthropology and Professor Maureen Carroll from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology, is the first study to investigate lead production and use in the Roman Empire, using archaeological and skeletal evidence from a specific site in Roman Italy.

Thousands of marks on the Antarctic seafloor, caused by icebergs which broke free from glaciers more than ten thousand years ago, show how part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated rapidly at the end of the last ice age as it balanced precariously on sloping ground and became unstable. Today, as the global climate continues to warm, rapid and sustained retreat may be close to happening again, and could trigger runaway ice retreat into the interior of the continent, which in turn would cause sea levels to rise even faster than currently projected.

A shipping container-sized pilot plant that can process a variety of wastes into valuable biofuels will be shipped from Germany to Edmonton thanks to a new future energy research collaboration between the University of Alberta and Germany’s Fraunhofer Society.

The plant, known as Biobattery, uses thermo-catalytic reforming (TCR) technology developed by Fraunhofer bioengineering researcher Andreas Hornung to process a variety of wastes into three valuable products––bio-oil, char and gases––at a rate of 30 kilograms per hour.

In the past decades, large areas of forest in Sumatra, Indonesia have been replaced by cash crops like oil palm and rubber plantations. New research, published in the European Geosciences Union journal Biogeosciences, shows that these changes in land use increase temperatures in the region. The added warming could affect plants and animals and make parts of the country more vulnerable to wildfires.

Microorganisms living in the sediments buried below the seafloor obtain their nutrients by using secreted enzymes to degrade adsorbed detritus. A new study shows that in order to survive for long time scales, microorganisms eat one another after they die.