It might be less visible than dwindling lion populations or vanishing pandas, but the quiet crisis of small mammal extinction is arguably worse for biodiversity. These species are crucial indicators of environmental health, but they can be very hard to monitor, and many species with very different ecological niches look almost identical.
Academic freedom is often described as a cornerstone of democratic society. Politicians regularly claim to defend it, universities invoke it in mission statements and most members of the public say they support it in principle.
A few thousand years ago, sugar was unknown in the western world. Sugarcane, a tall grass first domesticated in New Guinea around 6000BC, was initially chewed for its sweet juice rather than crystallized. By around 500BC, methods to boil sugarcane juice into crystals were first developed in India.
The search for better oxygen carriers has long centered on one key question: how can we design metal oxides that can reversibly store and release lattice oxygen efficiently at lower temperatures? This reversible behavior underpins clean-energy technologies such as fuel conversion, CO2 capture, and chemical looping for hydrogen production, where reaction feasibility and efficiency depend directly on a material's oxygen storage and release capacity (OSC).
Transparent electrodes transmit light while conducting electricity and are increasingly important in bioelectronic and optoelectronic devices. Their combination of high optical transparency, low electrical resistance, and mechanical flexibility makes them well suited for applications such as displays, solar cells, and wearable or implantable technologies.
Last week, Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture (YCNCC) Scientific Leadership Team member and Earth & Planetary Sciences Professor Noah Planavsky co-authored a peer-reviewed comment in npj Climate Action titled "The importance of radical transparency for responsible carbon dioxide removal." YCNCC News spoke with Planavsky about why greater transparency is necessary, and how transparency is an important theme across the Center's work to advance carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
As the Dark Energy Survey (DES) releases its final results, we caught up with two physicists who've been involved in the project from its early days. In this Q&A, Josh Frieman, DES co-founder and associate laboratory director for fundamental physics at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Risa Wechsler, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, discuss what the decade-long effort taught us and how it prepares us for the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's 10-year mission to explore some of the universe's biggest mysteries.
In lush South Florida, trees and bushes grow all year round. And that means yard waste and dead trees never stop piling up. But leaving them in a landfill is a climate-warming issue. Two South Florida governments think they have a new solution—light it on fire, but in a planet-friendly way.
On Jan. 23, the Trump administration gave its approval for plans to build Sites Reservoir, a vast 13-mile-long off-stream lake north of Sacramento that would provide water to 500,000 acres of Central Valley farmland and 24 million people, including residents of Santa Clara County, parts of the East Bay and Los Angeles.
Some galaxies in the early universe were absolute powerhouses, churning out stars at rates that would dwarf the Milky Way's modest stellar production. These "monster galaxies," buried deep in dust between 10 and 12 billion years ago, are thought to be the ancestors of today's giant elliptical galaxies. But what drove them to grow so violently has remained frustratingly unclear.
