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What if we could not only clean up the heavy metals in our water systems, but also recycle those metals and reuse them?

A new study from the Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Spain suggests that, soon, we might be doing just that.

lear-cutting loosens up carbon stored in forest soils, increasing the chances it will return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change, a Dartmouth College study shows.

The findings appear in the journal Soil Science.

Soil is the world's largest terrestrial carbon pool. In northern hardwood forests in the United States, mineral soil pools store up to 50 percent of total ecosystem carbon. Logging and other land-use changes are a major cause of soil carbon release, but there has been recent interest to further understand soil carbon dynamics in forested ecosystems after logging. This is of particular importance in the northeastern U.S. because of the great potential for the use of biomass as part of a diversified renewable energy portfolio.

The Dartmouth researchers explored whether clear-cutting changes the strength of the chemical bonds of carbon stored in mineral soils in hardwood forests in the northeastern United States. Clear-cutting involves harvesting all timber from a site at once rather than selectively culling mature trees. Carbon is stored in soil by binding only to certain soil structures.

The researchers collected soils from recently clear-cut forests and from older forests, and pulled carbon from the soil in a sequence of gentle to stronger extractions. The results showed that mature forest stands stored significantly more soil organic carbon in strongly mineral-bound and stable carbon pools than did soils from cut stands.

Cerca de una décima parte de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero globales generales de la agricultura podría relacionarse a los residuos de alimentos a mediados de siglo, según un estudio reciente. Un equipo del Instituto de Potsdam para la Investigación del Impacto Climático, por primera vez ofrece proyecciones integrales de pérdida de alimentos para los países de todo el mundo también calculando las emisiones asociadas. Actualmente, un tercio de la producción mundial de alimentos no llega a nuestros platos. Esta proporción aumentará drásticamente, si los países emergentes como China e India adoptan estilos de vida occidentales de nutrición, según los análisis muestran. La reducción de los residuos de alimentos ofrecería la oportunidad de garantizar la seguridad alimentaria, lo que es bien conocido. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, podría ayudar a mitigar el cambio climático peligroso.

Las conversaciones sobre el clima que concluyeron en diciembre pasado fueron un gran éxito, pero pasarán décadas antes de que podamos juzgar si el Acuerdo de París es en última instancia exitoso. Se puede decir que el acuerdo proporciona una buena base para un progreso significativo en el cambio climático y representa una dramática salida de los últimos 20 años de negociaciones sobre el clima.

Disastrous floods in the Balkans two years ago are likely linked to the temporary slowdown of giant airstreams, scientists found. These wind patterns, circling the globe in the form of huge waves between the Equator and the North Pole, normally move eastwards, but practically stopped for several days then -- at the same time, a weather system got stuck over Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia that poured out record amounts of rain. The study adds evidence that so-called planetary wave resonance is a key mechanism for causing extreme weather events in summer. Further, the scientists showed that extreme rainfall events are strongly increasing in the Balkans, even more than the globally observed rise.

"We were surprised to see how long the weather system that led to the flooding stayed over the region -- it's like the Vb cyclone 'Yvette' was trapped there," says Lisa Stadtherr from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead-author of the study to be published in Science Advances. "Day after day the rain was soaking the soil until it was saturated, which lead to the flooding that reportedly caused several dozen casualties and 3.5 billion Euro of damages."