A team of Virginia Tech geoscientists found a new way to look at the widespread impacts of dams on river temperatures: using Landsat thermal infrared imagery to gather data on rivers across the United States. By using satellite imagery instead of site-specific on-the-ground measurements, researchers can draw from a much larger pool of data.

Existing computer models used to guide decisions about energy infrastructure and contamination often treat microbes as fixed and unchanging, even though they constantly adapt to their surroundings. University of Maine researchers are aiming to close the gap by analyzing microbial genetic information using artificial intelligence to identify the biological processes that most strongly influence underground chemical reactions. Those insights will then be integrated into existing subsurface models, allowing scientists to better simulate how microbes, minerals and groundwater interact in changing environments.

Calculating a fossil’s position throughout geological history is a complex process. In palaeontology and other disciplines, determining a location in the past is quite a challenge that requires refined computational tools to process large volumes of data. Now, the BIOST3 Research Group at the University of Barcelona has designed an open-access web interface for the general public that simplifies this process and facilitates access to high-quality palaeogeographic reconstructions. This innovative tool, the Paleocoordinates Calculator (PACA), will help to overcome the technological barrier to facilitate access to high-quality paleogeographic reconstructions.

New research found that the century-old yardstick used across many industries to estimate air-conditioning and refrigeration energy demand — called cooling degree days — is missing something fundamental. The study reports a new, physics-based version of the metric — effective cooling degree days — that captures how temperature and humidity together impact the actual work a cooling system is required to do. Applying it across North America, they found that cooling efficiency has been quietly declining by 2–4% per decade since 1971, and that the old temperature-only metric misjudges how much cooling is required in different regions, overstating demand in some places and understating it in others.