articles

How would today’s weather patterns look in a warmer, wetter atmosphere – an expected shift portended by climate change?

Colorado State University researcher Kristen Rasmussen offers new insight into this question – specifically, how thunderstorms would be different in a warmer world.

As cars become more fuel-efficient, less heat is wasted in the exhaust, which makes it harder to clean up the pollutants that are emitted. But researchers have recently created a catalyst capable of reducing pollutants at the lower temperatures expected in advanced engines. Their work, published this week in Science magazine, a leading peer-reviewed research journal, presents a new way to create a more powerful catalyst while using smaller amounts of platinum, the most expensive component of emission-control catalysts.

HIV, dengue, papillomavirus, herpes and Ebola – these are just some of the many viruses that kill millions of people every year, mostly children in developing countries. While drugs can be used against some viruses, there is currently no broad-spectrum treatment that is effective against several at the same time, in the same way that broad-spectrum antibiotics fight a range of bacteria. But researchers at EPFL's Supramolecular Nano-Materials and Interfaces Laboratory – Constellium Chair (SUNMIL) have created gold nanoparticles for just this purpose, and their findings could lead to a broad-spectrum treatment. Once injected in the body, these nanoparticles imitate human cells and “trick” the viruses. When the viruses bind to them – in order to infect them – the nanoparticles use pressure produced locally by this link-up to “break” the viruses, rendering them innocuous. The results of this research have just been published in Nature Materials.

Carbon capture could help the nation’s coal plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet economic challenges are part of the reason the technology isn’t widely used today. That could change if power plants could turn captured carbon into a usable product.

Lakes suffering from harmful algal blooms may not respond to reduced, or even discontinued, artificial nitrogen loading.

Many blue-green algae responsible for algal blooms can fix atmospheric nitrogen dissolved in the water, and therefore water stewards should focus their efforts on removing phosphorus from lakes to combat algal blooms.