articles

In 2015, a rural community in southeastern California approached Daniel Winkler and his doctoral advisor, Travis Huxman, for help with an invader that was hurting their local economy. An Old World annual plant called Sahara mustard (Brassica tournefortii) was spreading rapidly through the deserts of the southwestern U.S., carpeting the local Anza-Borrego Desert in spring, and smothering the native wildflowers that draw tourists to the region. Loss of native plants put the animals that depend on them for food and shelter at risk. The mustard was disrupting the entire desert ecosystem.

Vast amounts of toxic mercury are accumulating in the Arctic tundra, threatening the health and well-being of people, wildlife and waterways, according to a UMass Lowell scientist investigating the source of the pollution. 

A research team led by Prof. Daniel Obrist, chairman of UMass Lowell’s Department of Environmental, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, found that airborne mercury is gathering in the Arctic tundra, where it gets deposited in the soil and ultimately runs off into waters. Scientists have long reported high levels of mercury pollution in the Arctic. The new research identifies gaseous mercury as its major source and sheds light on how the element gets there. 

As air temperatures rise at constant pressure, the density of air declines and this makes it harder for an airplane to take off. Increased air temperatures due to climate change could therefore present a new challenge for the aviation industry. This is according to Ethan Coffel of Columbia University in the US, lead author of a study in Climatic Change Letters which is a section in Springer’s journal Climatic Change. 

New research from a professor of engineering at UBC’s Okanagan Campus might hold the key to biofuels that are cheaper, safer and much faster to produce.

“Methane is a biofuel commonly used in electricity generation and is produced by fermenting organic material,” says Cigdem Eskicioglu, an associate professor with UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering. “The process can traditionally take anywhere from weeks to months to complete, but with my collaborators from Europe and Australia we’ve discovered a new biomass pretreatment technique that can cut production time nearly in half.”

Most of today’s lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from cars to phones, use a liquid as the electrolyte between two electrodes. Using a solid electrolyte instead could offer major advantages for both safety and energy storage capacity, but attempts to do this have faced unexpected challenges.