In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team of scientists found that China has made a concerted effort to successfully improve water quality of rivers, but water pollution and biodiversity in lakes remain a challenge in the Yangtze River Basin. Comprehensive management of lakes aligned with social and economic development are requested to promote regional sustainable development.

In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team of scientists evaluate scenarios about what is causing methane concentrations to rapidly increase in the atmosphere. By combining new and novel isotopic datasets on methane source ‘signatures’ with simple atmospheric models, they ran thousands of potential emission pathways and isolated those that best matched the observed change of methane isotopes in the atmosphere. Using this approach, the authors found that the methane sources most likely driving the increase are from human activities, including agriculture, landfills and waste management, and from the use of coal, oil and gas. These activities are responsible for more than 80% of the rise of atmospheric methane since 2007. The analysis suggests that wetland emissions have not contributed significantly to increases in atmospheric methane, despite continued warming and climate extremes.

A recent paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences presents an improved pDSSAT model based on the Wang-Engel temperature response function and further analyses the spatiotemporal changes in winter wheat phenology in China from 2000 to 2015 and its climatic drivers.

A new technique takes bioprinting — in which an ink of cells is printed, layer by layer, to form a structure — to a whole new, and icy level. Investigators from the Zhang lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a technology that they term “cryobioprinting,” a method that uses a bioink embedded with cells to print frozen, complex structures that can be easily stored for later use.

Down near the Earth's core, there are zones where seismic waves slow to a crawl. New research finds that these enigmatic and descriptively-named ultra-low velocity zones are surprisingly layered. Modeling suggests that it’s possible some of these zones are leftovers from the processes that shaped the early Earth—remnants of incomplete mixing like clumps of flour in the bottom of a bowl of batter.

Chinese researchers have discovered the tallest Begonia recorded in Asia. The plant belongs to a new species aptly called Begonia gigantica and was described in the open-access journal PhytoKeys. In Tibet’s Mêdog county, China, the team found a Begonia so tall that they had to stand on top of their vehicle to measure it. The plant was 3.6 meters tall, with the thickest part of its ground stem close to 12 cm in diameter.