Wetlands efficiently remove nitrogen pollution from surface water, leading to cost savings for municipalities
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 26-Nov-2025 12:11 ET (26-Nov-2025 17:11 GMT/UTC)
Wetlands are an important part of the ecological system, providing a myriad of benefits for people, wildlife, and the environment. They also serve as “nature’s kidneys,” filtering out pollutants from surface water. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign finds that wetlands along the Mississippi River Basin effectively clean up nitrogen runoff from agricultural fields. The researchers also show this can lead to significant savings for local drinking water treatment facilities.
A new study from the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics finds that reducing prescriptions of sleep medication in older adults could provide substantial health and economic benefits.
New research has shown opt-out organ donation policies may reduce living organ donors, leaving systems overall no better supplied with lifesaving organs.
Opt-out organ donation policies which enrol everyone into post-mortem donation programmes by default unless people choose to opt out are being adopted by an increasing number of countries as a way to increase the supply of desperately needed organs.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham were part of an international team that analysed data from 24 countries from 2000 to 2023 and found that although opt-out policies did increase deceased organ donors by a small, non-significant amount of 7%, the number of living donors dropped significantly by 29%. Overall, the opposite effects of deceased and living donors on the supply of organs result in no additional benefit in donor numbers from moving to an opt-out policy.
The exploration-exploitation dilemma is a long-standing topic in deep reinforcement learning. In recent research, a noise-driven enhancement for exploration algorithm has proposed for UAV autonomous navigation. This algorithm introduces a differentiated exploration noise control strategy based on the global navigation training hit rate and the specific situations encountered by the UAV in each episode. Furthermore, it designs a noise dual experience replay buffer to amplify the distinct effects of noisy and deterministic experiences. This approach reduces the computational cost associated with excessive exploration and mitigates the problem of the navigation policy converging to a local optimum.