China to protect areas of high ecological importance identified by Stanford researchers

China leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions. Its biggest cities are shrouded in smog. And the country’s population is 1.4 billion people and growing. At least to the rest of the world, China isn’t known as a leader in environmental mindfulness.

Flipping the switch on ammonia production

Nearly a century ago, German chemist Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a process to generate ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases. The process, still in use today, ushered in a revolution in agriculture, but now consumes around one percent of the world’s energy to achieve the high pressures and temperatures that drive the chemical reactions to produce ammonia.

Today, University of Utah chemists publish a different method, using enzymes derived from nature, that generates ammonia at room temperature. As a bonus, the reaction generates a small electrical current. The method is published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Change in astronaut's gut bacteria attributed to spaceflight

Northwestern University researchers studying the gut bacteria of Scott and Mark Kelly, NASA astronauts and identical twin brothers, as part of a unique human study have found that changes to certain gut “bugs” occur in space.

The Northwestern team is one of 10 NASA-funded research groups studying the Kelly twins to learn how living in space for a long period of time -- such as a mission to Mars -- affects the human body. While Scott spent nearly a year in space, his brother, Mark, remained on Earth, as a ground-based control.

A new study confirms: Pregnant women should avoid liquorice

Liquorice and its natural sweetener, glycyrrhizin, can have long-term harmful effects on the development of the fetus.

Mathematically optimizing traffic lights in road intersections

Traffic modeling has been of interest to mathematicians since the 1950s. Research in the area has only grown as road traffic control presents an ever-increasing problem. 

Generally, models for traffic flow in road networks are time-dependent and continuous, that is, they describe traffic by a continuum rather than as individual drivers or cars. These macroscopic models describe the temporal and spatial evolution of traffic density without predicting traffic patterns of individuals.  In addition to macroscopic models based on continuous densities, microscopic approaches like particle models or cellular automata are also used to model traffic.

Jekyll and Hyde cells: their role in brain injury and disease revealed

New research has shown how normally helpful brain cells can turn rogue and kill off other brain cells following injury or disease.Astrocytes have long been implicated in the pathology of a range of human neurodegenerative diseases or injuries including Alzheimer's, Huntington’s Parkinson’s disease, brain trauma and spinal cord injury.

Number of Children Emerging as Cardiovascular Risk Factor for Both Parents

Sophia Antipolis, 3 February 2017: Number of children is emerging as a novel factor that influences the risk for some cardiovascular diseases (CVD), and in some societies in both parents, according to Professor Vera Regitz-Zagrosek, chairperson of the European Society of Cardiology “management of CVD During Pregnancy” guidelines task force.

Researchers investigate decline in forest-birds

Forest-dwelling bird species are disappearing from some of South Africa's indigenous forests, with forest birds in the Eastern Cape being the most affected.

Great Barrier Reef building coral under threat from poisonous seaweed

World-first research on the Great Barrier Reef has shown how ‘weed-like’ algae will kill vital coral because of increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Study traces black carbon sources in the Russian Arctic

According to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 35% of black carbon in the Russian Arctic originates from residential heating sources, 38% comes from transport, while open fires, power plants, and gas flaring are responsible for only 12%, 9%, and 6% respectively. These estimates confirm previous work for some areas of the European Arctic, but for Siberia, the findings differ from previous research, which had suggested that contribution from gas flaring were much higher.