For thousands of years, people in the Middle East and South America have extracted water from the air to help sustain their populations. Drawing inspiration from those examples, researchers are now developing a lightweight, battery-powered freshwater harvester that could someday take as much as 10 gallons per hour from the air, even in arid locations. They say their nanofiber-based method could help address modern water shortages due to climate change, industrial pollution, droughts and groundwater depletion.

Researchers report a new type of battery –- made of paper and fueled by bacteria --- that could overcome challenges of getting power sources to remote areas.

High-performance computing resources and data-driven machine learning help University of Stuttgart researchers model how coal, nuclear, and geothermal power plants could be retrofitted for cleaner, safer, and more efficient and flexible operation.

UCLA bioengineers have demonstrated that a gel-like material containing tiny magnetic particles could be used to manage chronic pain from disease or injury.

In the second grade, Kelsey Moore became acquainted with geologic time. Her teachers instructed the class to unroll a giant strip of felt down a long hallway in the school. Most of the felt was solid black, but at the very end, the students caught a glimpse of red.

The amount of water used per well for hydraulic fracturing surged by up to 770 percent between 2011 and 2016 in all major U.S. shale gas and oil production regions, a new Duke University study finds.

It may seem off-putting to some, but human waste is full of nutrients that can be recycled into valuable products that could promote agricultural sustainability and better economic independence for some developing countries.

A few little cells that are different from the rest can have a big effect. For example, individual cancer cells may be resistant to a specific chemotherapy—causing a relapse in a patient who would otherwise be cured. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, scientists have now introduced a microfluidics-based chip for the manipulation and subsequent nucleic-acid analysis of individual cells. The technique uses local electric fields to highly efficiently “trap” the cells (dielectrophoresis).

A new research study published in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management tackles those questions and provides insights that can benefit land managers.

Methane released by thawing permafrost from some Arctic lakes could significantly accelerate climate change, according to a new University of Alaska Fairbanks-led study.