It can repel water, oil, alcohol and even peanut butter. And it might save the U.S. Navy millions of dollars in ship fuel costs, reduce the amount of energy that vessels consume and improve operational efficiency.
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is sponsoring work by Dr. Anish Tuteja, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, to develop a new type of “omniphobic” coating. This chemical coating is clear, durable, can be applied to numerous surfaces and sheds just about any liquid.

Young turtle doves raised on a diet of seeds from non-cultivated arable plants are more likely to survive after fledging than those relying on food provided in people’s gardens, new research into Britain’s fastest declining bird species has shown. 

Microelectrodes can be used for direct measurement of electrical signals in the brain or heart. These applications require soft materials, however. With existing methods, attaching electrodes to such materials poses significant challenges. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now succeeded in printing electrodes directly onto several soft substrates.

On 21 June 2018, the JRC published a new edition of the World Atlas of Desertification, offering a tool for decision makers to improve local responses to soil loss and land degradation.

Crack open a rock in the Clarkia Lagerstätte fossil site near Clarkia, Idaho, and you’re likely to find a well-preserved leaf from the middle of the Miocene Epoch 15 to 16 million years ago, preserved so well that you may even briefly see some of the original colors before they oxidize to black.

A new study by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists and colleagues confirms that increasing minimum winter temperatures allow beetles to expand their range but reveals that overcrowding can put the brakes on population growth.

Deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, nitrogen pollution – today’s agricultural feed cultivation for cattle, pigs and chicken comes with tremendous impacts for the environment and climate. Cultivating feed in industrial facilities instead of on croplands might help to alleviate the critical implications in the agricultural food supply chain. Protein-rich microbes, produced in large-scale industrial facilities, are likely to increasingly replace traditional crop-based feed. A new study now published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology for the first time estimates the economic and environmental potential of feeding microbial protein to pigs, cattle and chicken on a global scale. The researchers find that by replacing only 2 percent of livestock feed by protein-rich microbes, more than 5 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, global cropland area and global nitrogen losses could each be decreased.

A heat wave sweeps through a city and people swelter, running indoors to find air conditioning. But crops out in a field aren’t so lucky. For them, there is no escape.

A new statistical approach to disease surveillance may improve scientists’ and managers’ ability to detect chronic wasting disease earlier in white-tailed deer by targeting higher-risk animals.

Mass losses of the Antarctic Ice Sheet have increased global sea level by 7.6 mm since 1992, with 40% of this rise (3.0 mm) coming in the last five years alone. In West Antarctica, mass losses today amount to about 160 billion tons per year.