FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — When you test more than 200,000 soil samples in a year, you not only learn something about how Arkansans grow crops, gardens and lawns, but also the value of recommendations that result from soil test results. Each year, the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station publishes the Wayne E. Sabbe Arkansas Soil Fertility Studies. The latest edition, released in spring, features 12 research reports prepared by scientists with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a rocket used for both human and nonhuman space missions, and since 2010, the rocket has been launched over 400 times. Motivated by noise concerns from residents in Ventura County, a team of researchers from BYU and California State University, Bakersfield collected 132 measurements from sonic booms over an area of 200 square miles during the summer of 2024. By collecting data on multiple qualities of the Falcon 9 sonic booms, researchers can help discern how different launch-day variables affect a boom’s impact.

Researchers demonstrated a way to to manipulate electrons using pulses of light that last less than a trillionth of a second to record electrons bypassing a physical barrier almost instantaneously - a feat that redefines the potential limits of computer processing power.

Analyzing massive datasets from nuclear physics experiments can take hours or days to process, but researchers are working to radically reduce that time to mere seconds using special software being developed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge national laboratories. 

If you’ve ever watched a flock of birds move in perfect unison or seen ripples travel across a pond, you’ve witnessed nature’s remarkable ability to coordinate motion. Recently, a team of scientists and engineers at Rice University discovered a similar phenomenon on a microscopic scale, where tiny magnetic particles driven by rotating fields spontaneously move along the edges of clusters driven by invisible “edge currents” that follow the rules of an unexpected branch of physics. The research was published in the journal Physical Review Research.

The near-bottom water on the U.S. Northeast continental shelf provides a critical cold-water habitat for the rich regional marine ecosystem. This “cold pool” preserves winter temperatures, even when waters elsewhere become too warm or salty during the summer.

•           The U.S. Northeast coastal ocean has experienced accelerated warming in recent years, compared to the global average. Now, scientists using salt as a tracer are investigating how much the influx of salty offshore water onto the continental shelf contributes to the observed “erosion” of the seasonal cold pool.

•           This paper provides the first evidence for a seasonal salinification of the cold pool on the US Northeast continental shelf, as consistently observed in the multi-year mooring record of the [Ocean Observatories Initiative] Coastal Pioneer Array.