A new study reports that a biochar-enhanced photocatalyst can efficiently degrade antibiotic contaminants in water, offering a promising strategy for addressing one of the growing threats to global water quality.

After a year and a half of remote work and learning, UC Santa Barbara undergraduate students Sophia Lecuona Manos, Gabrielle Plewe, Carson Gadler and doctoral student Zoe Zilz returned to campus in late 2021 eager for some on-campus, hands-on research, an opportunity that was lost when COVID shut down universities and other public institutions in early 2020.

After creating tiny biological “robots” or biobots, scientists have taken the quest to reimagine life forms a step further, adding nerve cells and observing how they self-organize and alter biobot behavior. The resulting neurobots take on new shapes and show unique behaviors. The researcher seek to understand the rules of self-organization for the nervous system, and ultimately how to work with those rules to guide neurons to new structures in the lab or restore existing tissues in the body.

Iowa State researchers are teaming up with international collaborators to develop a web tool that helps farmers identify and manage the insects, weeds and diseases that threaten their crops. The project's work at Iowa State is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how scientists study and manage the environment. A new perspective article suggests that AI is creating a new research paradigm that moves environmental science from traditional observation based approaches toward predictive and intelligent systems capable of addressing complex global challenges.

Electrochemical capacitors, often called supercapacitors, are the sprinters of the energy world. They charge instantly and deliver massive bursts of power on demand. The trade-off, however, is their lack of endurance: they cannot store much total energy, and they tend to leak their charge quickly when sitting idle. While engineers know that cranking up the operating voltage could solve the energy density problem, doing so almost always causes the internal chemical bath (the electrolyte) to break down and fail.

A new study published in Big Earth Data introduces Geo-Disasters, a database that geocodes 9,217 climate-related disasters reported by EM-DAT from 1990 to 2023. The database enhances disaster risk analysis by providing accurate geocoded locations and offering an open, reproducible framework for integrating spatial climate and socioeconomic data. This framework supports machine learning applications for climate risk, vulnerability, and adaptation studies. The Geo-Disasters database aims to bridge critical data gaps in global climate-hazard risk assessment and inform more equitable adaptation planning. The link to Geo-Disasters Database is https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15487667.