A University of Alberta forestry professor has cracked a key mystery surrounding the mountain pine beetle.

After studying lodgepole pine trees in the Grande Prairie area that survived a pine beetle attack, U of A professor Nadir Erbilgin and his team discovered certain chemicals in the trees that produce high levels of resin—sticky sap—that overwhelms the insect.

Immunotherapy is an emerging field in the global fight against cancer, even though scientists and clinicians have been working for decades to find ways to help the body’s immune system detect and attack cancerous cells. Doug Mahoney’s lab at the University of Calgary recently discovered an immunotherapy that uses existing cancer drugs in a whole new way.

A natural process that occurs during photosynthesis could lead to the design of more efficient artificial solar cells, according to researchers at Georgia State University.

During photosynthesis, plants and other organisms, such as algae and cyanobacteria, convert solar energy into chemical energy that can later be used as fuel for activities. In plants, light energy from the sun causes an electron to rapidly move across the cell membrane. In artificial solar cells, the electron often returns to its starting point and the captured solar energy is lost. In plants, the electron virtually never returns to its starting point, and this is why solar energy capture in plants is so efficient. A process called inverted-region electron transfer could contribute to inhibiting this “back electron transfer.”

Two species of songbirds that once made a home in the Bahamas likely became extinct on the islands because of rising sea levels and a warmer, wetter climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Florida, Gainesville. The study, which was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a historical view of how climate change and the resulting habitat loss can affect Earth’s biodiversity.

NASA's Aqua satellite used infrared light to gather cloud top temperature data from the newest tropical cyclone in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. Tropical Depression Sanvu formed just north of the Northern Marianas islands.

The Atmospheric Infrared or AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data on the eastern side of Tropical Cyclone Sanvu on Aug. 28 at 0253 UTC (Aug. 27 at 10:53 p.m. EDT). Infrared data provides temperature information to scientists. Cloud top temperatures are an important factor when it comes to determining the strength of storms. The higher the cloud tops, the colder and the stronger the storms.

Collaboration between researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) shows the high potential of silicon-based multijunction solar cells.

Commercial electricity customers who are subject to high demand charges may be able to reduce overall costs by using battery energy storage to manage demand, according to research by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

NOAA's GOES East satellite provided an image of Potential Tropical Cyclone 10 as it continued moving north along the U.S. East Coast.

The system is still not a tropical cyclone and the chances for the system to become a tropical cyclone appear to be decreasing. Regardless, National Hurricane Center noted that tropical-storm-force winds and heavy rains are expected over portions of North Carolina later today, Aug. 29.

A Tropical Storm Warning was in effect from north of Surf City to Duck, North Carolina and for the Albemarle Sound and Pamlico Sound.

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, an analysis of Hurricane Harvey's tremendous rainfall was created using eight days of satellite data.

NASA's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM or IMERG product is used to make estimates of precipitation from a combination of space-borne passive microwave sensors, including the GMI microwave sensor onboard the Global Precipitation Measurement satellite GPM core satellite, and geostationary IR (infrared) data. 

Just after Tropical Storm Pakhar made landfall in southeastern China and NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of the storm.