On-demand Arctic observations with low-cost balloon systems could sharpen local storm forecasts

The production of many products used in everyday life and in industry, such as pharmaceuticals, plastics, and coatings, requires chemical catalysts, often expensive noble metals with limited availability. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are now presenting the first air-stable iron compound, which enables the direct use of iron(I) for catalysis and, unlike previous methods, does not require strong reducing agents. A first test yielded active iron catalysts.

There are tens of thousands of near-Earth objects (NEOs) that represent some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. Planning trajectories to rendezvous with these miniature worlds is notoriously difficult, and requires a massive amount of computational power to calculate. But a new paper from astrodynamicist Alessandro Beolchi of Khalifa University of Science and Technology and his co-authors offers a much less computationally intensive way to find these trajectories, and has the added bonus of finding much less energy-intensive paths to boot.

How are cold air masses advancing in the United States connected to fertilizers carried by “flying rivers” from Africa that nourish the soils of the Brazilian Amazon? An article published in Geophysical Research Letters reveals an atmospheric connection between these distant regions.

Researchers found that genetics may account for about half of the variation in human lifespan, which is at least twice as much as previous estimates and, in some cases, much higher.

Subtle changes are occurring in the nighttime world on our planet, according to NASA scientists who say an unexpected pattern has surfaced in new maps of the world’s artificial light.

Researchers from Brown University and their collaborators have developed a new way to measure the properties of cells—an important development, they say, because accurate measurements of changes in cell elasticity can be used to better understand diseases, diagnose patient symptoms and provide more accurate prognoses.