A new study has revealed that the lasting effects of biochar depend strongly on the material it is made from, with straw-derived biochar offering clear advantages for maize productivity under limited-water conditions. The research, published in Biochar, shows that combining wheat-straw biochar with an alternate partial root-zone drying irrigation system can boost crop yield and resource efficiency for at least two growing seasons after a single biochar application.

Wastewater can replace clean water as a source for hydrogen, eliminating a major drawback to hydrogen fuel and reducing water treatment costs of hydrogen production by up to 47%, according to new research from Princeton Engineering.

Wetlands are an important part of the ecological system, providing a myriad of benefits for people, wildlife, and the environment. They also serve as “nature’s kidneys,” filtering out pollutants from surface water. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign finds that wetlands along the Mississippi River Basin effectively clean up nitrogen runoff from agricultural fields. The researchers also show this can lead to significant savings for local drinking water treatment facilities.

The SETI Institute announced that it will incorporate the new NVIDIA IGX Thor platform to enhance its real-time search for signals from space at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Northern California. The collaboration brings cutting-edge AI technology—built for demanding real-world environments—into radio astronomy for the first time at this scale.

The ATA’s 42 antennas scan the sky for radio signals that may reveal cosmic events or, one day, evidence of intelligent life. Using the NVIDIA IGX Thor platform, the SETI Institute will be able to process and interpret these signals directly at the telescope, dramatically reducing the time it takes to recognize unusual or promising data.

“NVIDIA IGX Thor enables us to run AI inference and GPU-accelerated signal processing workloads closer to the edge,” said Luigi Cruz, Staff Engineer at the SETI Institute. “Its compact form factor and power efficiency makes it an ideal development platform for our next-generation pipeline, which is based on NVIDIA Holoscan.”