How membranes may have brought about the chemistry of life on earth
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 11-Sep-2025 23:11 ET (12-Sep-2025 03:11 GMT/UTC)
A team of researchers led by Thomas Richards at the University of Oxford, UK, studied the properties of membranes to understand how these cellular structures influenced the chemistry of life on earth as it began. The researchers published their findings on May 20th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.
Twenty-three University of Texas at Arlington students have been selected for the McNair Scholars Program, a competitive Department of Education program that prepares undergraduates for academic research careers.
“The McNair Scholars Program has proven to be a great way for undergraduate students considering a career in academia to see firsthand how scientific research is conducted and the real-world impacts that can come from it,” said Kayunta Johnson-Winters, director of undergraduate research at UTA and an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
New research could improve the efficiency of electrochemical carbon-dioxide capture and release by six times and cut costs by at least 20 percent. MIT researchers added nanoscale filtering membranes to a carbon-capture system, separating the ions that carry out the capture and release steps, and enabling both steps to proceed more efficiently.
Scientists from The University of Texas at Arlington are among the researchers worldwide recognized with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their contributions to the ATLAS Experiment. The $1 million award honors the team’s groundbreaking work at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization of Nuclear Research, known as CERN—the world’s largest particle physics laboratory—which led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, often called the “God particle” for its key role in explaining the existence of mass in the universe.
The Arctic is one of the coldest places on Earth, but in recent decades, the region has been rapidly warming, at a rate three to four times faster than the global average. However, current climate models have been unable to account for this increased pace. Now, researchers at Kyushu University have reported in a study, published April 29 in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research, that clouds may be to blame.