The material is a compound similar to clay and enables inspectors to carry out in-situ assessment of structural conditions in buildings, bridges, dams and other structures without having to drill for samples and analyze them in a laboratory.

The School will be held in São Paulo, Brazil, between October 27 and November 8. Sixty young environmental scientists and technicians from Brazil and abroad will be selected to participate.

The researchers developed a model that projects the time taken for trees native to the Atlantic Rainforest to reach the ideal size to be harvested for the timber industry. The study analyzed data for 13 Atlantic Rainforest restoration areas involving ten species of native trees that could be commercially useful to the timber industry. Publication of the findings comes during the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

The land crab Johngarthia lagostoma occurs only on four ocean islands, three of which are in Brazil, but little is known of its natural history. Brazilian researchers discovered that a hill and beach on Trindade Island play a key role in the species’ reproductive cycle and survival.

Traditional wet markets, the main source of fresh food for the citizens of Hanoi, Vietnam have been tricky to study because of a lack of traceability and sales registration system—but a new study shows how researchers used free Wi-fi to track the flow of over 600,000 people through the markets.

A study published in the journal Science shows for the first time the degree of threat to all tree species in the biome, classifying 65% as vulnerable or endangered to some extent. According to the authors, their findings are conservative – the actual situation could be even more alarming.