For most of us, office cooling and heating systems are like wallpaper: you only really notice them if they catch fire.

Month-on-month, year-on-year, the world continues to experience record high temperatures. 

The Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy at the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology is leading a Department of Energy project that aims to accelerate discoveries of new, commercially viable hidden geothermal systems in the Great Basin region of the Western United States.

The site in Western Australia holds one of the country’s largest and oldest iron ore mines.

For smallholder farmers living in hot and arid regions, getting fresh crops to market and selling them at the best price is a balancing act.

A new system developed by chemical engineers at MIT could provide a way of continuously removing carbon dioxide from a stream of waste gases, or even from the air.

A new set of analytical techniques developed by Texas A&M researchers can help predict if wave-energy devices will capsize in rapidly changing ocean environments.

A new study coordinated by CU Boulder makes clear the extraordinary speed and scale of increases in energy use, economic productivity and global population that have pushed the Earth towards a new geological epoch, known as the Anthropocene. Distinct physical, chemical and biological changes to Earth’s rock layers began around the year 1950, the research found.

Led by Jaia Syvitski, CU Boulder professor emerita and former director of the Institute of Alpine Arctic Research (INSTAAR), the paper, published today in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, documents the natural drivers of environmental change throughout the past 11,700 years—known as the Holocene Epoch—and the dramatic human-caused shifts since 1950. Such planetary-wide changes have altered oceans, rivers, lakes, coastlines, vegetation, soils, chemistry and climate.

“This is the first time that scientists have documented humanity’s geological footprint on such a comprehensive scale in a single publication” said Syvitski, former executive director of the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, a diverse community of international experts from who study the interactions between the Earth’s surface, water and atmosphere.

Read more at: University of Colorado at Boulder

An international team of climate experts, including Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine, today released an assessment of carbon dioxide emissions by industry, transportation and other sectors from January through June, showing that this year’s pandemic lockdowns resulted in a 9 percent decline from 2019 levels.

When people imagine “new materials,” they typically think of chemistry. But UConn physicist Ilya Sochnikov has another suggestion: mechanics.