Superbly preserved fossils from Russia cast new and surprising light on one of the earliest tetrapods — the group of animals that made the evolutionary transition from water to land and ultimately became the ancestors not just of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, but of ourselves.
Read moreProduction of hazardous waste during drug manufacturing is a serious concern for the pharmaceutical industry. Typically, large amounts of flammable solvents are used during these processes, which usually require several steps to make structurally complex drugs. Researchers now report a method to produce pharmaceutically relevant compounds in just two or three steps, with water as the only waste product, using renewable woodchips as starting material.
Read moreWorld governments and other leadership bodies are taking vital steps to protect the ocean but more progress is urgently needed, scientists reported today at the Our Ocean Conference.
Read moreThe transition from coal to natural gas in the US electricity sector is reducing the industry's water use, research finds. For every megawatt of electricity produced using natural gas instead of coal, the water withdrawn from rivers and groundwater drops by 10,500 gallons, and water consumed for cooling and other plant operations and not returned to the environment drops by 260 gallons. Switching to solar or wind power could boost these savings even more.
Read moreThe search for sustainable approaches to generating new fuels has brought scientists back to one of the most abundant materials on Earth — reddish iron oxide in the form of hematite, also known as rust.
Read moreResearchers describe the emerging role of ecophysiology in riparian flooding. As an adaptation to an overabundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, trees, plants and grasses constrict their stomatal pores to regulate the amount of the gas they consume, a mechanism that limits the release of water from leaves through evaporation. This saturates soils and causes more efficient run off and river flooding.
Read moreScientists have put elite wheat varieties through a sort of 'Photosynthesis Olympics' to find which varieties have the best performing photosynthesis. This could ultimately help grain growers to get more yield for less inputs in the farm.
Read moreScientists investigated a material that uses sunlight for splitting water molecules (H2O) to obtain dihydrogen (H2). Since dihydrogen can be used as clean fuel, this study provides relevant insight for researchers dealing with clean energy generation.
Read moreA new study shows that the presence or absence of moonlight has a considerable bearing on when migratory birds take flight in the autumn.
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