University of Utah microbubbles clean dirty soil in China

Microbubbles are much bigger than they sound. If all goes as planned during a demonstration project in eastern China, microbubble technology developed at the University of Utah has the potential to boost a wide range of environmental ...

A genetic alternative to fertilizer

Several studies have shown that a lack of nitrogen in soils adversely affects crop yields. The modern use of nitrogen fertilizers has improved yields to meet expanding global food demand, but in some cases up to 50% of the ...

Global warming makes tropical soils leak carbon dioxide

Tropical forest soil warmed in experiments to levels consistent with end-of-century temperature projections released 55 percent more CO2 than control plots, exposing a previously underestimated source of greenhouse gas emissions, ...

Microplastics threaten typical remote cryospheric regions

Microplastics usually refer to plastic fibers, films, fragments, and microbes with size less than five millimeters. They are widely distributed in water, soil, sediment, the atmosphere, and even snow and ice, which impacts ...

Forest soils recovering from effects of acid rain

Before the United States 1970 Clean Air Act, rainfall all over the country was acidic. As precipitation would fall from the sky, it would mix with gases from industrial plants, emissions from cars, and especially coal and ...

Decontamination method zaps pollutants from soil

Filtration systems are designed to capture multiple harmful substances from water or air simultaneously, but pollutants in soil can only be tackled individually or a few at a timeā€”at least for now.

Tropical forests are fertilized by air pollution

Scientists braved ticks and a tiger to discover how human activities have perturbed the nitrogen cycle in tropical forests. Studies at two remote Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory sites in Panama and Thailand ...

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