Decoding life under our waters to ensure species' survival

Four hundred million lines of text: that’s how much data is in a single gene-sequencing file when Scott Pavey’s team receives it. If you wanted to scan it manually, and generously assume it would take one second per line to look at, it would take you 12 and a half years of reading around the clock to get through it all.

Solving a sweet problem for renewable biofuels and chemicals

ASU scientists harness the trial-and-error power of evolution to coax nature into revealing answer to energy challenge

Whether or not society shakes its addiction to oil and gasoline will depend on a number of profound environmental, geopolitical and societal factors.

How does municipal waste collection affect climate change?

Researchers from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid suggest a new methodology to assess the environmental impact of the containers used for the collection of urban waste.

An inappropriate design of a container system might unnecessarily aggravate the impact on environment when collecting and transporting the urban waste. This is the major conclusion of a team of researchers from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid after carrying out a systematic evaluation process of the urban containerization system.

'Perfect storm' led to 2016 GBR bleaching

Researchers from James Cook University and the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgiumsay unprecedented oceanographic conditions in 2016 produced the perfect storm of factors that lead to a mass coral bleaching.

JCU’s Professor Eric Wolanski said even in very warm years with a summer el Nino event, such as 1998, there was no massive coral bleaching in the Torres Strait and only small to moderate bleaching in the northern Great Barrier Reef.

Concurrent hot and dry summers more common in future

In the past, climate scientists have tended to underestimate the risk of a co-occurrence of heatwave and drought. This is the conclusion of one of the first studies to examine compound climate extremes.

NASA Examines Tropical Storm Nanmadol Inside and Out

Two NASA satellites provided a look at the Northwestern Pacific Ocean's latest tropical storm from outside and inside. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided an outside look at Nanmadol when it's maximum sustained winds peaked, and the GPM Core satellite provided an inside look at the rainfall within the storm.

Before consolidating into the fifth depression of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean's hurricane season, Nanmadol was a low pressure system designated System 99W. That low pressure area developed and was renamed Nanmadol on July 2.

Practical parallelism

The chips in most modern desktop computers have four “cores,” or processing units, which can run different computational tasks in parallel. But the chips of the future could have dozens or even hundreds of cores, and taking advantage of all that parallelism is a stiff challenge.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new system that not only makes parallel programs run much more efficiently but also makes them easier to code.

Computer system predicts products of chemical reactions

When organic chemists identify a useful chemical compound — a new drug, for instance — it’s up to chemical engineers to determine how to mass-produce it.

There could be 100 different sequences of reactions that yield the same end product. But some of them use cheaper reagents and lower temperatures than others, and perhaps most importantly, some are much easier to run continuously, with technicians occasionally topping up reagents in different reaction chambers.

Extreme weather conditions and climate change account for 40% of global wheat production variability

JRC scientists have proposed a new approach for identifying the impacts of climate change and extreme weather on the variability of global and regional wheat production. The study analysed the effect of heat and water anomalies on crop losses over a 30-year period.

Eyes on Nature: How Satellite Imagery Is Transforming Conservation Science

High-resolution earth imagery has provided ecologists and conservationists with a dynamic new tool that is enabling everything from more accurate counting of wildlife populations to rapid detection of deforestation, illegal mining, and other changes in the landscape.