The inventory identified some 1,000 landslide points in São Sebastião (São Paulo state, Brazil). The research group is now using airborne laser scanning and other data inputs to create a methodology capable of more precise results.

Engineers from RMIT University have invented a protective coating for concrete pipes that could help drastically reduce the formation of fatbergs in sewers.

Fat, oil and grease (known as FOG) – infamous for solidifying inside pipes and concrete sewers – causes half of all sewer blockages in the United States and 40% in Australia. The cost of these blockages in terms of maintenance and rehabilitation is estimated at US$25 billion in the US and A$100 million in Australia per year.

New England is warming faster than any other part of the United States due to climate change. Part of the havoc a warming world wreaks is on the “water budget”—the frequency, timing and amount of precipitation, where that moisture goes once it lands, how it interacts with trees and plants, how much evaporates and how it eventually seeps into the ground and flows as subsurface water. Thanks to a $498,999 grant from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), David Boutt, professor in the Department of Earth, Geographic and Climate Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will spend the next three years building advanced integrated hydrologic models that will allow New England to predict with spatial precision how the region’s water budget will change in the coming years.

The airflow from an indoor badminton court’s HVAC system and cross ventilation can affect the path of a birdie and have a significant role in play, but research published in Physics of Fluids proposes that different roof configurations could help mitigate wind drift. The authors recommend that important badminton games be played on courts with a barrel roof and a ventilation opening. The team modeled the airflow in a barrel roof stadium with different ventilation opening directions and tested this against a simulation of a flat roof to understand the roof effects.