In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team of scientists evaluate scenarios about what is causing methane concentrations to rapidly increase in the atmosphere. By combining new and novel isotopic datasets on methane source ‘signatures’ with simple atmospheric models, they ran thousands of potential emission pathways and isolated those that best matched the observed change of methane isotopes in the atmosphere. Using this approach, the authors found that the methane sources most likely driving the increase are from human activities, including agriculture, landfills and waste management, and from the use of coal, oil and gas. These activities are responsible for more than 80% of the rise of atmospheric methane since 2007. The analysis suggests that wetland emissions have not contributed significantly to increases in atmospheric methane, despite continued warming and climate extremes.

A recent paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences presents an improved pDSSAT model based on the Wang-Engel temperature response function and further analyses the spatiotemporal changes in winter wheat phenology in China from 2000 to 2015 and its climatic drivers.

A new technique takes bioprinting — in which an ink of cells is printed, layer by layer, to form a structure — to a whole new, and icy level. Investigators from the Zhang lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a technology that they term “cryobioprinting,” a method that uses a bioink embedded with cells to print frozen, complex structures that can be easily stored for later use.

Down near the Earth's core, there are zones where seismic waves slow to a crawl. New research finds that these enigmatic and descriptively-named ultra-low velocity zones are surprisingly layered. Modeling suggests that it’s possible some of these zones are leftovers from the processes that shaped the early Earth—remnants of incomplete mixing like clumps of flour in the bottom of a bowl of batter.

Colombia currently houses several million refugees and migrants, of whom 1.8 million are from Venezuela. The success of the country’s pandemic control measures will depend on the careful monitoring of infection levels, including within this particularly vulnerable population. Experts from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin will support the efforts of local health care authorities by delivering SARS-CoV-2 tests and training laboratory staff to use them. A particular emphasis will be placed on monitoring the Mu variant, which is currently under investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) and has spread widely throughout Colombia. This project is receiving approximately € 2 million in funding, which is being provided by the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH’ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).