Researchers at The University of Manchester have shown that microbial communities from terrestrial hot springs could be harnessed to convert industrial CO₂ emissions into useful products, offering new routes towards a circular, low-carbon economy.

Floatable beads made from chitosan and cellulose acetate and enhanced with bentonite were engineered to effectively clean oil from water. The beads showed good oil adsorption capacity while remaining easy to collect from the water surface. 

Researchers from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa recently published a study showing that they can skillfully predict El Niño and La Niña 15 months ahead of time using only observations of the ocean surface temperature and height–no complex climate model needed.

Scientists from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have uncovered the earliest fossil evidence of annelids (ringed worms) in Cambrian microfossils dating back approximately 535 million years ago. This discovery offers fresh insights into the origin and early evolution of the annelids, a group of animals that includes bristle worms, earthworms, leeches, and peanut worms.

A research team with scientists from MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen studies the hemispheric origin of Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) and find a high Southern Hemispheric contribution over the past 800,000 years. The results, now published in the journal Nature Communications, highlight an important and direct pathway from high southern latitudes to the tropical oceans.

An international team from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, the National University of Mongolia, and Okayama University of Science has rediscovered a long-lost dinosaur tracksite in northern Mongolia dating to approximately 120 million years ago (Early Cretaceous). The site preserves 31 footprints from both large herbivorous sauropods and large carnivorous theropods on a single surface, providing the first clear evidence that large dinosaurs inhabited this far-northern region.

The overlapping sauropod trackways suggest sequential movement behavior, while theropod tracks indicate multiple large predators. This discovery fills a major gap in Mongolia’s Early Cretaceous fossil record and provides new insights into dinosaur distribution and ecosystem connections between East Asia and North America. The findings were published in Ichnos.

Oceanographers from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa discovered that microbial communities–from the sunlit surface to extreme depths–in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre exhibit robust seasonal cycles. The study provides new insight into how high levels of biodiversity are maintained in the open ocean.