Prohibiting fishing in conservation reserves is a common strategy for protecting ocean ecosystems and enhancing fisheries management.

2020 is the worst fire year on record in the United States, with nearly 13 million acres burned, 14,000 structures destroyed and an estimated $3 billion spent on fire suppression — and counting.

Twice as much freshwater is stored offshore of Hawaii Island than was previously thought, according to a University of Hawaii study with important implications for volcanic islands around the world. An extensive reservoir of freshwater within the submarine southern flank of the Hualālai aquifer has been mapped by UH researchers with the Hawaii EPSCoR ʻIke Wai project.

Global warming already affects Siberian primrose, a plant species that is threatened in Finland and Norway. 

Regional air–sea coupling plays a crucial role in modulating the climatology and variability of the Asian summer monsoon. 

The future could hold portable and wearable sensors for detecting viruses and bacteria in the surrounding environment.

Iron-deficiency anaemia is a major concern in low-income settings, especially for women. 

A team of scientists has succeeded in visualizing how carbon dioxide (CO2) behaves in an ionic liquid that selectively absorbs CO2. 

Understanding how particles travel through a device is vital for improving the efficiency of solar cells. Researchers from KAUST, working with an international team of scientists, have now developed a set of design guidelines for enhancing the performance of molecular materials.

When a packet of light, or photon, is absorbed by a semiconductor, it generates a pair of particles known as an exciton. An electron is one part of this pair; the other is its positively charged equivalent, called a hole. Excitons are electrically neutral, so it is impossible to set them in motion by applying an electric field. Instead the excitons "hop" by a random motion or diffusion. The dissociation of the excitons into charges is necessary to create a current but is highly improbable in an organic semiconductor.

“So typically, we need to blend two semiconductors, a so-called electron donor and an electron acceptor, to efficiently generate free charges,” explains Yuliar Firdaus. “The donor and acceptor materials penetrate into one another; maximizing the exciton diffusion length— the distance the exciton can travel before recombining and being lost— is crucial for optimizing the organic solar cell’s performance.

Read more: King Abdullah University of Science & Technology

Bilayer solar cell based on the organic semiconductor copper(I) thiocyanate (CuSCN) provides a new platform for exciton diffusion studies. (Photo Credit: © 2020 KAUST)

Developing safe and sustainable fuels for nuclear energy is an integral part of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s energy security mission.