The Mekong River, one of the world’s largest, traverses six Southeast Asian countries and supports the livelihoods of millions of people. New efforts to provide hydroelectric power to a growing and modernizing population include more than eight proposed main-stem dams and 60 or more existing tributary dams in the lower Mekong basin. A new article from University of Illinois and Iowa State University scientists lays out what dam construction could mean for residents and the environment in the region.

With the rise of herbicide-resistant weeds in most grain and vegetable crops, farmers are looking for alternatives to herbicides to control weeds. Cover crops offer one potential weed management tool. Their use in specialty crops is limited, and no testing has been done so far in edamame. However, a new University of Illinois study reports that early-killed cereal rye shows promise for edamame growers.

A day at the beach beset by heavy clouds or the sticky heat of a salty haze can seem like the work of large, unpredictable forces. But behind such atmospheric phenomena are billions of tiny interactions between the air and microscopic drops of saltwater cast upward as bubbles on the ocean’s surface burst.

The same satellites that identify severe weather can help save you from it.

At the end of winter term in 2014, Lotfi Belkhir was approached by a student taking his Total Sustainability and Management course who asked, “What does software sustainability mean?”

Technique using plant's own DNA could produce crops that are more resistant to drought and disease

How much water flows through a river has little influence over long-term changes to its course and the surrounding landscape, a study of waterfalls shows.

For nearly two decades, scientists have noted dramatic changes in arctic tundra habitat. Ankle-high grasses and sedges have given way to a sea of woody shrubs growing to waist- or neck-deep heights. This shrubification of the tundra challenges animals like caribou that are adapted to low-stature arctic vegetation.

More than 11,000 people died during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2013-16, demonstrating both the deadly nature of the virus and the limitations of the medication used to fight it.

Today, when an enterprise wants to use machine learning to solve a problem, they have to call in the cavalry. Even a simple problem requires multiple data scientists, machine learning experts, and domain experts to come together to agree on priorities and exchange data and information.

This process is often inefficient, and it takes months to get results. It also only solves the problem immediate at hand. The next time something comes up, the enterprise has to do the same thing all over again.

One group of MIT researchers wondered, "What if we tried another strategy? What if we created automation tools that enable the subject matter experts to use ML, in order to solve these problems themselves?"