ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

New research has shown how a synthetic self-made fibers can guide molecular movement that can be fueled by light over long distances, a discovery that could pave the way for new ways to use light as a source of sustainable energy.

The Scandinavian winter swimming culture combines brief dips in cold water with hot sauna sessions -- and now, a study of young men who participate regularly in these polar plunges finds that winter swimming may allow the body to adapt to extreme temperatures. The findings suggest that routinely alternating swims or dips in chilly water with sauna sessions might affect how brown fat, also known as brown adipose tissue (BAT), burns energy and produces heat.

Fraudulent practices in food production, especially false claims of geographical origin, cause billions of dollars in economic damage every year. Botanists have now developed a model that can be used to determine the origin of food in an efficient and low-cost manner.

A new automated numerical scheme is proposed for upper tropospheric cyclones (cutoff lows) and their earlier development stage as troughs (preexisting troughs). The proposed scheme has the capacity of early stage detection and can extract locations with transitions that are as smooth as possible and estimate their intensities, sizes, and even the local background flows behind them in a consistent and integrated manner using non-preprocessed (snapshot) basic weather data consisting of geopotential height fields.

A class of materials that once looked as if it might revolutionize everything from solar cells to frying pans -- but fell out of favor in the early 2000s -- could be poised for commercial resurrection, new findings suggest.

New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned 'discovery'. Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 document by a Milanese friar, Galvaneus Flamma, a Medieval Latin literature expert has made an 'astonishing' discovery of an 'exceptional' passage referring to an area we know today as North America.

Researchers have presented evidence that a Middle Bronze Age city called Tall el-Hammam, located in the Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea, was destroyed by a cosmic airburst.

Researchers have developed a versatile composite fabric that can deactivate both biological threats, such as the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and chemical threats, such as those used in chemical warfare. A material that is effective against both classes of threats is rare. The new material also is reusable. It can be restored to its original state after the fabric has been exposed to threats by a simple bleach treatment.

A team of scientists and doctors has developed a capability to detect airborne SARS-CoV-2 RNA -- the nucleic acid coding for the virus that causes COVID-19 -- indoors through air sampling. When trialed in two inpatient wards of a major Singaporean hospital caring for active COVID-19 patients the air surveillance approach produced a higher detection rate of environmental SARS-CoV-2 RNA (72%) compared to surface swab samples (9.6 percent) collected in the same area.

The Tomb of Nestor's Cup, a famous burial in Italy, contains not one deceased individual, but several, according to a new study.

Humans in the Middle East were using complex fishing tools and techniques by 12,000 years ago, according to a new study.