All eyes were on Quaise Energy at the 2026 Geothermal Rising Conference, the flagship conference for the geothermal industry, in late September. The news related to Quaise included: the announcement of up to $25 million funding from the US Department of Energy, a talk on the company’s progress to date on what it believes will be the world’s first commercial superhot geothermal power plant, and major awards to two employees.

Precipitation plays an important role in glaciers and ice sheet behaviour. To establish the relationship between atmospheric climate variation, precipitation patterns and glacier and ice sheet behaviour beyond the observable past, a new MARUM-led study created a precipitation record for southern Greenland. The authors found that positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) phases over at least the last circa 5,000 years consistently resulted in cooler but wetter conditions over southern Greenland. This in turn likely influenced local glacier advance or retreat, as well as the mass of the glaciers themselves. Their findings are now published in Nature Communications.

A new study from the University of Kansas appearing in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLOS One shows the differences between male and female uintatheres might not be as vast as paleontologists have long believed.

Some of the giant marine reptiles that ruled the seas during the age of dinosaurs were better built for surprise attacks, while their relatives were better suited to chasing prey through open water, according to a Rutgers-led study.

These animals, known as mosasaurs, were a group of lizards adapted to life in the ocean. Researchers reconstructed the bodies of four kinds of mosasaurs from their fossil skeletons, then applied principles of physics to estimate how quickly each could surge forward with a single powerful sweep of its tail. The research was published in the latest edition of Current Biology.

Researchers tracked air pollution at 15 monitoring sites across New York City during the first year of the country’s first congestion pricing program.

Fine particulate pollution inside the congestion zone fell about 13 percent beyond what regional trends, weather and year-to-year variability would predict.

The decline closely matched the roughly 11 percent drop in vehicles entering the zone, though pollution had already been falling citywide for other reasons.

Nitrogen dioxide dropped more than 20 percent across the metro area, but the study could not attribute that regional decline to congestion pricing.

The “top predator” from the Jurassic is relatively small in size: Megacauda sungei measures just half a meter from its nose to the tip of its tail. 165 million years ago, the furry ancestor to today’s mammals hunted its prey in water. The cusps of its teeth were also curved backwards to enable it to catch its slippery prey. However, the true evolutionary revolution is its soft palate, which separates the oral cavity from the pharynx while also enabling swallowing and breathing. This is an important requirement for suckling as a survival advantage. The findings by researchers from the Universities of Shenyang, Chicago, and Bonn are now being published in the journal ‘Nature’.