articles

A team of researchers, led by the University of Minnesota, has invented a new technology to produce automobile tires from trees and grasses in a process that could shift the tire production industry toward using renewable resources found right in our backyards.

Conventional car tires are viewed as environmentally unfriendly because they are predominately made from fossil fuels. The car tires produced from biomass that includes trees and grasses would be identical to existing car tires with the same chemical makeup, color, shape, and performance.

For the 100 million people who live within 3 feet of sea level in East and Southeast Asia, the news that sea level in their region fluctuated wildly more than 6,000 years ago is important, according to research published by a team of ocean scientists and statisticians, including Rutgers professors Benjamin Horton and Robert Kopp and Rutgers Ph.D. student Erica Ashe. That’s because those fluctuations occurred without the assistance of human-influenced climate change.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, Horton, Kopp, Ashe, lead author Aron Meltzner and others report that the relative sea level around Belitung Island in Indonesia rose twice just under 2 feet in the period from 6,850 years ago to 6,500 years ago. That this oscillation took place without any human-assisted climate change suggests to Kopp, Horton and their co-authors that such a change in sea level could happen again now, on top of the rise in sea level that is already projected to result from climate change. This could be catastrophic for people living so close to the sea.

Un equipo de ingenieros de la Universidad de Colorado, Boulder, ha desarrollado un material manufacturado escalable, un material de ingeniería con propiedades extraordinarias que no se encuentran en la naturaleza, para actuar como una especie de sistema de aire acondicionado para las estructuras que tiene la capacidad de enfriar objetos incluso bajo luz solar directa con cero energía y consumo de agua.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a night-time image of Tropical Cyclone Carlos using infrared light that showed the storm was being stretched out. Carlos is being adversely affected by the Westerlies.

New research by academics at the University of East Anglia (UEA), University of Kent and University of Lincoln, suggests that insights from behavioural science can help inform the design of road signs to bring about changes in driver behaviour.

Research in behavioural science has demonstrated how even very minimal cues or ‘nudges’ can sometimes have a powerful influence on human behaviour and decision-making. In this study, the researchers applied this approach to examine whether simple visual and written cues could be used to encourage drivers to switch off their engines while waiting at railway crossings.