MIT researchers built a battery-free, wireless underwater camera, powered by sound waves, that can take high-quality, color images, even in dark environments. It transmits image data through the open water to a receiver that reconstructs the color image.

Each year, billions of dollars are spent transferring residents from nursing homes to hospitals. Now, a research team at the University of Missouri is examining how a common form of communication — texting — can be used by nursing home staff to speed up decision-making and prevent the decline of residents’ health that can lead to costly and traumatic hospital transfers. To help address this costly and stressful issue, a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will help MU researchers show how nursing home staff can securely use HIPPA-compliant text messages to speed up decision-making in a way that can allow residents to be safely cared for in the nursing home without the need for a traumatic transfer to the hospital.

As part of the Belmont Forum-funded Sustainable Agriculture Matrix (SAM) Consortium led by the University of Maryland, Center for Environmental Science, the African Plant Nutrition Institute (APNI) with the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) organized a workshop in Marrakech, to engage key stakeholders and partners to develop a narrative for the sustainability of olive-based food systems in Morocco.

Climate change (e.g., global warming) is intensifying the global water cycle and the temporal variation of precipitation has increased significantly. The distribution of precipitation is more uneven over time, and drought and flood events occurred more frequently. This unstable variability in precipitation is particularly negative for crop growth. On the one hand, temporal variation in precipitation will directly affect the timing of crop fertilizer applications, further limiting the matching of fertilizer supply and crop demand. On the other hand, the increased temporal variability of precipitation leads to an asynchronous between N supply and N demand, which indirectly leads to more reactive nitrogen losses (including leaching loss, gaseous emissions, etc.), thus causing water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and other ecological environment and human health effects.

Researchers from Uppsala University and elsewhere have been studying the effect of rising temperatures on the lifespan of pollinating fig wasps. The findings show that the wasps lived much shorter lives at high temperatures, which would make it difficult for them to travel the long distances between the trees they pollinate.

Details of the orbits of 450 candidate exoplanet targets of the European Space Agency’s Ariel space mission have been presented this week at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022, and submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The study, coordinated by the ExoClock (www.exoclock.space) project, has been co-authored by 217 professional and amateur astronomers, as well as university and high school students.

A study by Eurac Research recently published in the Nature journal’s Scientific Reports paints a discouraging picture of recent decades. Between 1982 and 2020, the period of snow cover in mountain areas around the world decreased by an average of about 15 days. The Alps are in line with the average where the reduction in snow cover sits between 10 and 20 days. The study strengthens the results of earlier research by extending the observation period and has also helped to make a NASA model more accurate.