ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

The petrochemical industry turns oil and gas into precursors used to synthesize lubricants and other critical products. Chemists show that bacteria can be metabolically engineered to generate similar precursors, providing a sustainable replacement for fossil fuels and using less energy. The microbes need only glucose. The medium-chain hydrocarbons they produce can be broken down into shorter chains and polymerized into plastics, or lengthened to make products such as diesel.

A scientist has discovered a method for detecting and better defining meteorite impact sites that have long lost their tell-tale craters. The discovery could further the study of not only Earth's geology but also that of other bodies in our solar system.

By the late 21st century, northeastern U.S. cities will see worsening hurricane outcomes, with storms arriving more quickly but slowing down once they've made landfall. As storms linger longer over the East Coast, they will cause greater damage along the heavily populated corridor, according to a new study.

Volcanic gases are helping researchers track large-scale movements in Earth's deep interior. Scientists have discovered anomalous geochemical compositions beneath Panama.

It sounds like modern-day alchemy: Transforming sugar into hydrocarbons found in gasoline. But that's exactly what scientists have done. Researchers report harnessing the wonders of biology and chemistry to turn glucose (a type of sugar) into olefins (a type of hydrocarbon, and one of several types of molecules that make up gasoline).

In high enough concentrations, milkweed can kill a horse, or a human. To be able to eat this plant, monarchs evolved a set of unusual cellular mutations. New research shows the animals that prey on monarchs also evolved these same mutations.

Understanding how climate change will affect the flooding of rivers may become easier with a new framework for assessing flood risk that's been developed by an interdisciplinary team.

Researchers have conducted an empirical field study and concluded that single urban trees, such as street trees, function differently than trees grown in clusters featuring significantly greater transpiration rates. This result offers a new understanding of how to manage the landscape in urban settings to reduce the harmful effects of stormwater runoff.

Researchers have new evidence that could help rapidly boost efforts to scale-up the adoption of clean cooking with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in sub-Saharan Africa. The new study suggests that supply-side interventions such as shortening the distance to LPG retail points and improving access to multi-burner LPG stoves could help increase the consumption of the clean cooking fuels, for the benefit of public health, gender equality and environmental protection.

Joining the global effort to curb air pollution, researchers have developed computational tools to accurately assess the footprint of certain organic atmospheric pollutants. Their simulation could help government agencies keep a closer check on human-made sources of carbon-based pollutants.

Companies in the digital technology industry are significantly underreporting the greenhouse gas emissions arising along the value chain of their products. Across a sample of 56 major tech companies surveyed, more than half of these emissions were excluded from self-reporting in 2019. At approximately 390 megatons carbon dioxide equivalents, the omitted emissions are in the same ballpark as the carbon footprint of Australia. The research team has developed a method for spotting sources of error and calculating the omitted disclosures.

A new study describes a proof of principle for engineering a bacterium, Gluconobacter oxydans, that takes a big first step towards meeting skyrocketing rare earth element demand in a way that matches the cost and efficiency of traditional thermochemical extraction and refinement methods and is clean enough to meet U.S. environmental standards.

Thought scientists agree that diet, geography and evolutionary history structure the microbiome, the relative influence of each factor is a mystery. No rigorous study has investigated all three at once in wild mammal populations. Until now. A new study found that more than diet or geography, evolutionary history has the strongest influence on bacterial gut communities in both wild and captive woodrats.