https://phys.org/ en-us Latest news from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory The Delaware River Basin, a coastal watershed in the Mid-Atlantic region, has a long history of severe flooding with significant socioeconomic impacts. Recent research uses a process-based modeling approach to analyze hydrometeorological (like rainfall, snowmelt, and soil moisture) conditions during flood events over the past 40 years, revealing the spatial variability of flood mechanisms across the region. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-future-climate-shift-generating-mechanisms.html Environment Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:37:06 EDT news646587423 Finding a needle in a haystack is the quintessentially impossible task. But what if new tools could make it straightforwardly achievable? Imagine if, instead of searching through everything by hand, you could portion out small piles of hay and use magnets. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-ai-experimentation-energy-storage-solution.html Energy & Green Tech Machine learning & AI Wed, 25 Sep 2024 11:14:04 EDT news646481642 An electric vehicle manufacturer, two schools and two Alaskan villages: these are just some of the organizations using wind turbines to help meet their energy needs. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-small-power.html Business Energy & Green Tech Tue, 24 Sep 2024 09:17:41 EDT news646388250 Potential fusion power plants require materials capable of withstanding extreme conditions. Oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) steel represents a top candidate material, but current production is labor and cost intensive. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-alternate-approach-fabricating-steel.html Engineering Mon, 23 Sep 2024 16:03:28 EDT news646326204 After thousands of years as a highly valuable commodity, silk continues to surprise. Now it may help usher in a whole new direction for microelectronics and computing. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-2d-silk-protein-layers-graphene.html Nanomaterials Wed, 18 Sep 2024 14:40:10 EDT news645889201 If all the high-voltage transmission currently under construction and in advanced stages of permitting is built by 2030 in the Western United States—enabling the construction of new renewable energy projects—carbon dioxide emissions in the Western United States would drop by 73% compared to 2005. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-transmission-renewables-carbon-emissions-generation.html Engineering Energy & Green Tech Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:52:04 EDT news645720721 The Southern Annular Mode (SAM), with an iconic dipolar zonal wind pattern centered around the axis of the storm track, is the most dominant mode of variability orchestrating the weather and wind from the subtropics to the poles. Its origin, maintenance and feedback have been one of the central themes of atmospheric dynamics. But what role the clouds play in the life cycle of the annular mode remains largely unknown until now, while the wind pattern associated with SAM has long been observed to organize the distribution of cloud in the storm track. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-cloud-stumbling-block-propagation-southern.html Earth Sciences Environment Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:34:07 EDT news645719644 An experiment designed to answer questions about the radiation environment for manned space missions was launched from Kennedy Space Center today. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-national-lab-expertise-space.html Space Exploration Tue, 10 Sep 2024 17:05:03 EDT news645206701 Officials gathered at the Sequim campus of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to dedicate DOE's first hybrid-electric research vessel, RV Resilience. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-vessel-resilience-future-marine.html Energy & Green Tech Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:23:33 EDT news644840607 Nickel (Ni) and cobalt (Co) are critical elements for modern technologies, with high-grade Ni and Co ores becoming increasingly scarce. Mafic and ultramafic deposits are low-grade, abundant alternatives to traditional Ni and Co ores. However, new methods that make Ni and Co extraction and recovery from these deposits economically viable are needed. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-simulations-critical-elements-abundant-mineral.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Mon, 26 Aug 2024 12:30:02 EDT news643894201 Simulating flooding where rivers meet the ocean is challenging because existing Earth system models struggle to capture the complex interactions between river flows, ocean tides, and storm surges. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-highlights-advancements-simulate-multiscale-coastal.html Environment Fri, 23 Aug 2024 12:48:38 EDT news643636110 In a new study assessing how climate change might alter hydropower generation across the continental United States, researchers show that except for some parts of the Southwest, hydropower generation is expected to rise in the future. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-08-hydropower-generation-climate-uncertain-future.html Energy & Green Tech Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:03:04 EDT news643464182 When we flip the light switch in our homes, we have come to expect instant access to electricity. Behind the scenes, that reliability depends on utility operators who have developed control systems and fail-safes to keep the power flowing. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-08-electric-grid.html Energy & Green Tech Machine learning & AI Tue, 20 Aug 2024 13:44:04 EDT news643380241 Lateral water movement from ridges to valleys plays a key role in organizing water and energy at the watershed scale. But it has long been neglected in traditional land models. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-tracer-tool-role-lateral-hydrologic.html Environment Tue, 13 Aug 2024 16:20:52 EDT news642784851 Last year marked Earth's warmest year on record. A new study finds that some of 2023's record warmth, nearly 20%, likely came as a result of reduced sulfur emissions from the shipping industry. Much of this warming is concentrated over the northern hemisphere. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-shipping-emissions-air-quality.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 13 Aug 2024 10:12:03 EDT news642762721 Evapotranspiration (ET) is the movement of water from land to the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration. Moisture recycling describes the contribution from local ET to local precipitation. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-mesoscale-convective-local-evapotranspiration-moisture.html Environment Mon, 12 Aug 2024 10:00:33 EDT news642675630 How bacteria eat food, and what kinds of products they can make from that food, is dictated by the metabolic network of enzyme patterns encoded in their genomes. Using computational methods to learn these patterns across a large number of known bacteria allows the genome of a new bacteria to be analyzed. This reveals what kind of metabolism it is capable of—even when only partial information is provided, which is common in environmental samples. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-metabolic-potential-bacteria-limited-genome.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 08 Aug 2024 09:04:41 EDT news642326678 Scientists have developed a way to detect tiny amounts of hard-to-detect explosives more than eight feet away, reducing the need to swipe clothing, luggage or other materials. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-explosives.html Analytical Chemistry Tue, 06 Aug 2024 13:09:21 EDT news642168551 A complex interplay of energetics and dynamics governs the behavior of nanocrystals in solution. These dynamics are usually interpreted in terms of the theory developed by Derjaguin, Landau, Verwey, and Overbeek (DVLO), and understanding these forces is particularly important for controlling oriented attachment (OA), where individual nanocrystals fuse together in specific alignments. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-crystallization-particle.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Tue, 06 Aug 2024 09:45:24 EDT news642156321 Soils are among the largest viral reservoirs on Earth. Yet historically, soil viruses have been ignored. Recent work indicates the soil virosphere as a critical factor in human and environmental health, yet our understanding of global soil viral distributions, activities, and interactions with the soil microbiome remains limited. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-comprehensive-soil-virus-dataset-untapped.html Cell & Microbiology Molecular & Computational biology Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:19:15 EDT news642071952 Aerosol particles are tiny. Swirling suspended in the air around us, most are smaller than the smallest bug, thinner than the thinnest hair on your head, gossamer specks practically invisible to the naked eye. Newly formed ones are nano-sized. Yet their influence is gargantuan. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-born-modulate-reveal-climate-particles.html Earth Sciences Environment Sat, 03 Aug 2024 04:13:45 EDT news641877209 An experiment aimed at learning more about how plants grow in space will be aboard a National Aeronautics and Space Administration launch in early August from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-photosynthesis-space-station-explore-effects.html Space Exploration Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:20:01 EDT news641815254 Clouds play a pivotal role in the Earth's climate and weather. They form in a diversity of distinct patterns and types that can have profoundly different impacts on things such as the water cycle and how radiant energy moves through the atmosphere. Earth-observing satellites have been capturing images for decades and these datasets offer a unique opportunity to study clouds and their impact on the Earth system. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-ai-cloud-satellite-images-human.html Machine learning & AI Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:43:59 EDT news641637835 INPs are a rare subset of atmospheric aerosol that can initiate ice formation in clouds. There is a significant gap between scientists' ability to measure INPs and to predict their concentrations and variability in large-scale weather and climate models. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-agricultural-soils-efficient-ice-nucleating.html Earth Sciences Environment Tue, 30 Jul 2024 10:00:01 EDT news641551790 Every second of every day, utilities monitor the flow of power through the nation's electric grid, monitoring whether power generated matches power demanded by homes, businesses, vehicles and more. For every disruption—a substation outage, a felled utility pole, a generator failure—grid operators must work quickly to ensure that power goes where it's needed. https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-extreme-hurricanes-wildfires-summer-extremes.html Energy & Green Tech Mon, 29 Jul 2024 15:50:31 EDT news641487024 Developing efficient, selective, and scalable separations for critical materials, including lithium and magnesium, is essential to meeting the increasing demands for clean energy technologies and alleviating challenges with domestic supply chains. Graphene oxide (GO) membranes have shown promise for separating ions from mixed solutions based on size. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-surface-oxygen-functionality-metal-ions.html Analytical Chemistry Materials Science Thu, 25 Jul 2024 15:50:02 EDT news641141401 As we look to the sky above and ponder one of the biggest questions of our time—how to combat the carbon emissions that are driving climate change—a potential answer just may lie beneath our feet, in Earth's deep subsurface. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-underground-co8322-storage-carbon-mineralization.html Analytical Chemistry Thu, 25 Jul 2024 14:25:04 EDT news641136301 Turbulence, temperature changes, water vapor, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, and other gases absorb, reflect, and scatter sunlight as it passes through the atmosphere, bounces off the Earth's surface, and is collected by a sensor on a remote sensing satellite. As a result, the spectral data received at the sensor is distorted. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-ai-harnesses-physics-autocorrect-remote.html Earth Sciences Environment Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:44:21 EDT news640007057 Earth system models (ESMs) are essential tools to understand climate change impacts on wetlands. However, current ESMs usually represent wetland hydrology in oversimplified ways, resulting in low confidence of their projection of wetland evolution. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-climate-disrupt-inland-wetlands-north.html Earth Sciences Environment Wed, 10 Jul 2024 10:50:44 EDT news639827442 Aerosols, often emitted alongside greenhouse gases, can brighten clouds and cause significant cooling. However, the uncertainty associated with aerosol–cloud interactions (ACIs) is large and potentially significant enough to mask a sizable portion of greenhouse gas-related warming. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-aerosols-shown-size-cloud-cells.html Environment Tue, 09 Jul 2024 15:26:03 EDT news639757561