Antibiotics that enter rivers and coastal wetlands through wastewater, agriculture, and urban runoff may have far reaching impacts on the chemistry of these ecosystems, according to a new study that identifies the bacteria responsible for breaking down the antibiotic sulfamethoxazole and links this process to increased emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

A new study suggests that delaying the expansion of renewable energy might unintentionally reduce the world’s long term motivation to address climate change. The research finds that while the social cost of carbon usually rises as climate damages grow, it may suddenly fall once global warming passes a critical threshold. This drop in the social cost of carbon would weaken the economic incentive to reduce emissions and could speed up global warming.

To predict sea level changes, a University of Houston scientist has teamed with international partners to deliver an unprecedented view of the massive glaciers in Antarctica and to examine how they are shifting.  

A new Doctoral Network coordinated by Tampere University has secured €4.4 million in funding from the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme. The High-Power Optical Vortices (HiPOVor) project will train 15 doctoral researchers in the generation, amplification and application of high-power optical vortex beams. The consortium has set an ambitious goal: to establish optical vortex beams as a key enabling technology for advanced light-matter interaction.

A German-French team of physicists from TU Dortmund University, University of Würzburg, and Le Mans Université has succeeded in launching shear hypersound pulses with exceptionally large amplitudes in metal halide perovskites using pulsed optical excitation. This discovery was published in the journal Science Advances. Whereas the material has been of high interest for photovoltaics so far, the new results turn it into a candidate to be used for optically driven devices capable of generating and detecting sound waves at sub-terahertz frequencies, with potential applications across electronic, photonic, magnetic, and biomedical devices.

With victims numbering in the millions, malaria is an infectious disease caused by the bite of a mosquito carrying the malaria parasite. After penetrating the skin, the pathogen moves with helical trajectories. It almost always turns toward the right, as a team of physicists and malaria researchers from Heidelberg University recently discovered. Using high-resolution imaging techniques combined with computer simulations, the researchers demonstrated that the pathogen uses these right-handed helices to control its motion as it transitions from one tissue compartment to another.

Scientists at the University of Warwick and the National Research Council of Canada have achieved and measured the highest “hole mobility” ever recorded in a silicon-compatible material.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have manufactured organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on a nanoscale – that’s around a hundred times smaller than a human cell. This not only enables ultra-sharp screens and microscopes, but also opens up entirely novel possibilities for wave optics applications thanks to the extremely minute pixel size.