Tag «Carnegie Institution for Science»

More fertilizer and heavier monsoons spell future trouble for rivers in India

Washington, DC— India could be facing a water quality crisis as climate change affects the monsoon season, according to a new study from Carnegie’s Anna Michalak and Eva Sinha published in Environmental Science & Technology. Rainfall and other precipitation wash nutrients like nitrogen from fertilizers into waterways. When rivers, lakes, and coastal areas get overloaded …

The future is plant-based. But how do we get there?

Palo Alto, CAThe worlds population is growing, and global climate change will reshape our mapsshifting locations where human settlements can sustainably exist and thrive. Plant science can help us understand and mitigate the coming challenges, including fighting hunger, promoting renewable energy, and sequestering carbon pollution from the atmosphere. But in order to meet the moment, …

How to build a better wind farm

Washington, DCLocation, location, locationwhenit comes to the placement of wind turbines, the old real estate adage applies, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Carnegies Enrico Antonini and Ken Caldeira. Turbines convert the winds kinetic energy into electrical energy as they turn. However, the very act of installing …

Caribbean coral reefs under siege from aggressive algae

Baltimore, MD—Human activity endangers coral health around the world. A new algal threat is taking advantage of coral’s already precarious situation in the Caribbean and making it even harder for reef ecosystems to grow. Just-published research in Scientific Reports details how an aggressive, golden-brown, crust-like alga is rapidly overgrowing shallow reefs, taking the place of …

Geoengineering versus a volcano

Washington, DC— Major volcanic eruptions spew ash particles into the atmosphere, which reflect some of the Sun’s radiation back into space and cool the planet. But could this effect be intentionally recreated to fight climate change? A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters investigates. Solar geoengineering is a theoretical approach to curbing the effects of …

Amorphous diamond synthesized

  Washington, DC— A team of Carnegie high-pressure physicists have created a form of carbon that’s hard as diamond, but amorphous, meaning it lacks the large-scale structural repetition of a diamond’s crystalline structure. Their findings are reported in Nature Communications. Carbon is an element of seemingly infinite possibilities, because the configuration of its electrons allows …

Our Solar System’s “shocking” origin story

Washington, DC— According to one longstanding theory, our Solar System’s formation was triggered by a shock wave from an exploding supernova. The shock wave injected material from the exploding star into a neighboring cloud of dust and gas, causing it to collapse in on itself and form the Sun and its surrounding planets. New work …