Some of the world's smallest animals and their tiny poops could aid in the fight against climate change. A Dartmouth-led study reports that clay dust sprayed on the surface of seawater converts free-floating carbon particulates into food for zooplankton, which the microscopic animals later deposit deep into the sea as feces. The particulates are the remnants of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by marine plants that re-enters the atmosphere when the plants die. This new method redirects the carbon into the marine food chain.

The way hydrocarbon molecules interact with light can affect the production of nitrous acid in the atmosphere. In this study, researchers used an ultrafast electron camera to image the motions of hydrocarbon molecules at ultrafast, ultrasmall scales. They identified a proton transfer step followed by an out-of-plane twisting motion as key components of energy relaxation after molecules interact with light.

Members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have elected Alan Sealls to the position of AMS president-elect for 2025, as well as electing six new members of the AMS Council: Stephen B. Bennett, Danielle A. Breezy, Jenny Frankel-Reed, Stephanie C. Herring, John M. Lanicci, and Russ A. Schumacher. 

Encountering Neptune in 1989, NASA's Voyager mission completed humankind's first close-up exploration of the four giant outer planets of our solar system. Collectively, since their launch in 1977, the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were far more complex than scientists had imagined. There was a lot more to be learned.

A NASA Hubble Space Telescope observation program called OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand their atmospheric dynamics and evolution.

MIT astronomers have found a way to spot the smallest, “decameter,” asteroids within the main asteroid belt. They used their approach to detect more than 100 new asteroids, ranging from the size of a bus to several stadiums wide, which are the smallest asteroids within the main belt detected to date. 

Eric Stach of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science and colleagues used neural networks to better identify the characteristics of catalysts that drive the creation of liquid fuels from sunlight.