Oil and Gas Wastewater Spills, including Fracking Wastewater, Alter Microbes in West Virginia Waters

Wastewater from oil and gas operations – including fracking for shale gas – at a West Virginia site altered microbes downstream, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The study, published recently in Science of the Total Environment, showed that wastewater releases, including briny water that contained petroleum and other pollutants, altered the diversity, numbers and functions of microbes. The shifts in the microbial community indicated changes in their respiration and nutrient cycling, along with signs of stress.

Fishing for bacteria in New Zealand

If you asked Richard Sparling, what he did during his sabbatical early last year, he’d probably say “fishing in New Zealand.”

But this ambiguous answer by the department of microbiology associate professor does not tell the whole story.

Sediment Flows into Galveston Bay Studied to Help Understand Health of Watershed

A better understanding of sediment and freshwater flow into Galveston Bay is now available from a new U.S. Geological Survey report, done in cooperation with the Texas Water Development Board, and the Galveston Bay Estuary Program.

India Using Coal Tax Money to Fund Renewable Energy Projects

India has a goal of quadrupling the amount of electricity it generates from renewable sources to 175 gigawatts by 2022. 

Serendipity Uncovers Borophene's Potential

Almost one year ago, borophene didn’t even exist. Now, just months after a Northwestern Engineering and Argonne National Laboratory team discovered the material, another team led by Mark Hersam is already making strides toward understanding its complicated chemistry and realizing its electronic potential.

From rocks in Colorado, evidence of a chaotic solar system

Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.

NASA Telescope Reveals Largest Batch of Earth-Size, Habitable-Zone Planets Around Single Star

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.

The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

Cultivating cool-for-cash-crops

When deciding what crops to grow during a season, growers look at several factors. Do the crops have a good yield in their area? Does the area currently have the resources - usually water - to grow that crop? Will the crop give a return on the investment? And, what are the future effects that growing that crop might have on the grower’s fields?

'Smart' bacteria remodel their genes to infect our intestines

Hebrew University researchers describe how infectious bacteria sense they’re attached to intestinal cells and remodel their gene expression to exploit our cells and colonize our gut.

Researchers Gain Insight Into a Physical Phenomenon That Leads to Earthquakes

Scientists have gotten better at predicting where earthquakes will occur, but they’re still in the dark about when they will strike and how devastating they will be.