Biochar is often described as a climate-smart soil amendment because it can improve soil quality while storing carbon for long periods. But once biochar is added to soil, it does not stay unchanged. Rain, drying, minerals, oxygen, and microorganisms gradually alter its surface, chemistry, and environmental functions. For saline soils, where salt stress already limits crop production across many agricultural regions, scientists have had limited information about how biochar changes over time.

Tea is one of the world’s most widely consumed beverages, but the soils that sustain tea plantations are under growing pressure. Long-term fertilizer use, monocropping, soil acidification, nutrient loss, heavy metal contamination, and climate stress are threatening both tea productivity and environmental safety. A new review published in Biochar examines how biochar, a carbon-rich material produced by heating biomass under limited oxygen, could become a practical tool for more sustainable tea cultivation.

Rice feeds billions of people, but flooded paddy fields are also an important source of methane, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period. A new five-year field study suggests that the way biochar is applied may determine whether rice farming can achieve durable climate benefits.

Scientists have identified the two biggest reasons that once-pristine rivers across the Arctic are growing cloudy with toxic orange iron particles that smother insects and suffocate fish. 

To the point:

In view of recent geopolitical tensions and the disruption of energy imports, an interdisciplinary and international research team led by Yafang Cheng at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry assessed how the costs and benefits of renewable energy expansion in the European Union may evolve under changing conditions.

Fossil fuel energy prices have risen to a level where faster deployment of renewable energies to achieve carbon neutrality is expected to provide substantial air quality, health and economic co-benefits beyond climate protection. The investigated scenarios, building on the fuel price levels observed during the years 2021–2023, yield EU-wide net benefits in the range of approximately 100 to 600 billion Euros.

A newly developed system dynamics model with country-specific parameters was applied to account for dynamic changes of electricity costs upon rapid renewable expansion, allowing for more realistic projections.

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) discovered a thermal response phenomenon in which Ba₄Ru₃O₁₂, a dense, inorganic oxide formed by high-pressure synthesis, increases in volume by about 4.4% when heated, and this expanded state is retained even after cooling. Normally, such a large volume change is accompanied by substantial changes in the crystal structure or chemical reactions and alters the material properties. In this research, however, NIMS elucidated that “giant irreversible expansion” occurs through atomic rearrangement within a crystal, while retaining the basic crystal framework, i.e., the symmetry of the crystal structure, and chemical composition. The research result demonstrates a new thermal response mechanism in oxide materials, and is expected to lead to new design guidelines for ceramic materials used in a high-temperature environment or materials that control thermal deformation and stress.

SAN ANTONIO — June 1, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has upgraded its Ocean Simulation Laboratories with a new 30-inch diameter pressure vessel. This new vessel allows SwRI to test larger equipment at conditions that simulate full-ocean depth and features a novel SwRI-designed quick-acting closure.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a novel image projection system that delivers super-resolution images over an extended depth of field. By combining a neural network-based digital encoder with a passive all-optical diffractive decoder, the system drastically compresses image data for efficient transmission of information. This platform operates without extra power at the decoding stage, promising advancements for next-generation virtual and augmented reality displays.