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A global team of researchers has published the first-ever Wild Emmer wheat genome sequence in Science magazine. Wild Emmer wheat is the original form of nearly all the domesticated wheat in the world, including durum (pasta) and bread wheat. Wild emmer is too low-yielding to be of use to farmers today, but it contains many attractive characteristics that are being used by plant breeders to improve wheat.

Improving projections for how much ocean levels may change in the future and what that means for coastal communities has vexed researchers studying sea level rise for years, but a new international study that incorporates extreme events may have just given researchers and coastal planners what they need.

The study, published today in Nature Communications  uses newly available data and advanced models to improve global predictions when it comes to extreme sea levels. The results suggest that extreme sea levels will likely occur more frequently than previously predicted, particularly in the west coast regions of the U.S. and in large parts of Europe and Australia.

A new low-temperature solution printing technique allows fabrication of high-efficiency perovskite solar cells with large crystals intended to minimize current-robbing grain boundaries. The meniscus-assisted solution printing (MASP) technique boosts power conversion efficiencies to nearly 20 percent by controlling crystal size and orientation.

NASA satellite imagery revealed that Tropical Depression 4 appears to be losing its punch, and the National Hurricane Center expects the storm to weaken.

On July 7, 2017, at 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 UTC), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Depression 4 as it continued moving through the north Central Atlantic Ocean. The image showed that the depression consisting of a possible circulation center embedded within a very small area of intermittent convection. The MODIS image does not show much organization.

Biodiversity loss is one of the driving factors in ecosystem change, on par with climate change and human development. When one species, especially a large predator, disappears from an area, other populations will be affected, sometimes changing entire landscapes.