Nitrogen fertilizer is essential for modern agriculture, but a substantial share of applied nitrogen can escape from farmland rather than reaching crops. One major pathway is ammonia volatilization, which wastes valuable fertilizer and contributes to air pollution and broader environmental problems.

Massive blooms of Sargassum can create serious environmental and economic problems when the seaweed accumulates along coastlines. A new study suggests that this troublesome marine biomass could instead become a useful resource for capturing carbon dioxide.

Advanced wastewater treatment technologies are widely used to remove pollutants and pathogens before treated water is discharged or reused. However, a new study suggests that some of these processes may also create an overlooked environmental risk.

Salk scientists use DNA origami technique to build dye-cycling ORBIT, a method for tracking protein-DNA interactions for hours at single base-pair resolution. Using dye-cycling ORBIT, the team measured the rotation of RNA polymerase during DNA transcription. The method will allow scientists to study molecular movements that were previously impossible to see or study, adding a new dimension to life science research.

How many sharks should a coral reef have? It sounds like a simple question, but almost nowhere on Earth is there a pristine, untouched reef. So there is no yardstick against which to measure shark decline or recovery.

Making two-dimensional (2D) multiferroics, materials that host both ferromagnetic and ferroelectric orders, is technologically challenging because thinning bulk materials results in defects and degradation of functional properties. The realization of 2D magnets and 2D ferroelectrics in van der Waals materials offers a different route: By combining the two, it may be possible to engineer a 2D material that exhibits both orders. Wang et al. successfully implemented this strategy to fabricate a van der Waals heterostructure consisting of the ferromagnet Fe₃GaTe₂ and ferroelectric CuInP₂S₆. The researchers applied small voltages across the heterostructure to modulate the magnetic coercivity of the ferromagnetic layer at room temperature, indicating the presence of magnetoelectric coupling. —Jelena Stajic