Mountainous landscapes store far more carbon than previously thought, new research shows
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 15-Jun-2026 23:16 ET (16-Jun-2026 03:16 GMT/UTC)
• UCF Associate Professor Samik Bhattacharya’s research on wing shapes could help develop mathematical models that improve the performance and stability of the U.S. military’s amphibious vehicles.
• The technology can also be used for search-and-rescue missions and disaster response.
• The work is supported through a grant from the DEVCOM Army Research Office.
Thermal diffusion—a fundamental physical process pervasive in applications ranging from electronics to industrial systems—is inherently irreversible under the second law of thermodynamics. As temperature gradients spontaneously smooth out over time, crucial information regarding the initial thermal state is permanently lost due to entropy increase. This fundamental information loss leads to a severe ill-posedness in inverse thermal problems, where infinitesimal errors in the final observation can cause enormous uncertainties in the reconstructed initial state.
Researchers have developed a solar driven catalyst material that harnesses the energy of a single photon to reduce carbon dioxide and oxidise organic waste at the same time, and produce valuable chemicals in both reactions.