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The Colorado River’s two great reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are in retreat. Multi-year droughts and chronic overuse have taken their toll, to be sure, but vast quantities of water are also lost to evaporation. What if the same scorching sun that causes so much of this water loss were harnessed for electric power? 

Installing floating solar photovoltaic arrays, sometimes called “floatovoltaics,” on a portion of these two reservoirs in the southwestern United States could produce clean, renewable energy while shielding significant expandes of water from the hot desert sun. 

Los investigadores del Centro RIKEN de Ciencia de Recursos Sostenibles (CSRS por sus siglas en inglés) en Japón, junto con sus colaboradores en la Universidad Sains Malaysia (USM) han tenido éxito en la decodificación de la secuencia del genoma del Hevea Brasiliensis, árbol nativo de caucho natural de Brasil. Publicado en informes científicos, el estudio informa de un borrador de la secuencia del genoma que cubre más del 93% de los genes expresados, e identifica regiones específicas para la biosíntesis del hule.

Species across the world are rapidly going extinct due to human activities, but humans are also causing rapid evolution and the emergence of new species. A new study published today summarises the causes of manmade speciation, and discusses why newly evolved species cannot simply replace extinct wild species. The study was led by the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen. 

Forget mousetraps -- today's scientists will get the cheese if they manage to build a better battery.

An international team led by Texas A&M University chemist Sarbajit Banerjee is one step closer, thanks to new research published today (June 28) in the journal Nature Communications that has the potential to create more efficient batteries by shedding light on the cause of one of their biggest problems -- a "traffic jam" of ions that slows down their charging and discharging process.

All batteries have three main components: two electrodes and an intervening electrolyte. Lithium ion batteries work under the so-called rocking-chair model. Imagine discharging and charging a battery as similar to the back-and-forth motion of a rocking chair. As the chair rocks one way, using its stored energy, lithium ions flow out of one electrode through the electrolyte and into the other electrode. Then as the chair rocks the other way, charging the battery after a day's use, the reverse happens, emptying the second electrode of lithium ions.

Una posible causa de la alarmante mortandad de las abejas que estamos presenciando es el uso de los insecticidas sistémicos muy activos llamados neonicotinoides. Un efecto hasta ahora desconocido y perjudicial de los neonicotinoides ha sido identificado por investigadores del Centro Médico de la Universidad de Mainz y la Universidad Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Descubrieron que los neonicotinoides en concentraciones bajas reducen la concentración de acetilcolina en la jalea real, alimento larval secretada por las abejas nodrizas. Esta molécula es relevante para el desarrollo de las larvas de las abejas melíferas. En dosis más altas, los neonicotinoides también dañan los llamados microcanales de la glándula jalea real en el que se produce la acetilcolina. Los resultados de esta investigación han sido publicados recientemente en la eminente revista científica PLoS ONE.