News by Subject Earth Science

Researchers at The University of South Australia's Future Industries Institute have developed technology that could eliminate water stress for millions of people, including those living in many of the planet's most vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.

Researchers in Sweden have developed a more eco-friendly way to remove heavy metals, dyes and other pollutants from water. The answer lies in filtering wastewater with a gel material taken from plant cellulose and spiked with small carbon dots produced in a microwave oven.

Scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators are more confident in projecting ENSO changes under global warming, although ENSO-related climate variability seems doomed to increase.

Removing salt is only one step in creating clean water from ocean or brackish water. Toxic compounds, from metals to human-made carcinogens, must be removed by subsequent processing. UC Berkeley chemists have invented a technique to remove salt and toxic ions in one step. They create porous nanoparticles, PAFs, with added functional groups that selectively absorb ionic compounds, like metals, or neutral species, like boron, then add them to the polymer membranes used in electrodialysis.

A new paper published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies presents the results of and images from the resuming of the archaeological seasons in the Mons Smaragdus region in the Egyptian Eastern Desert. During the 1990s a team from the "Berenike Project" started to survey the area and conducted the first excavations, focusing on the main site identified, Sikait, where the archaeological seasons resumed in January of 2018 and January 2020.

Satellite views of Earth's major river systems reveal their familiar treelike drainage patterns. The pattern - called dendritic - and its prevalence suggests that it may be the optimal state in which rivers exist. Challenged by the knowledge that numerical models of drainage evolution have yet to substantiate this assumption, researchers are now thinking of rivers as existing in a persistent reorganizational state instead of being in a set, stable configuration. Understanding this has implications for land use and infrastructure management decisions.

University at Buffalo engineers report a new process of 3D printing graphene aerogels that they say overcomes two key hurdles -- scalability and creating a version of the material that's stable enough for repeated use -- for water treatment.