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IMAGE: Rice Investigation, Communication and Education (RICE) Facility at the University of Delaware where the Seyfferth Lab conducts rice experiments in outdoor rice paddies. view more
Credit: Matt Limmer
When most people hear food contamination, they think of bacteria present on unwashed fruits or vegetables, or undercooked meat. However, there are other ways for harmful contaminants to be present in food products.
Angelia Seyfferth, a member of the Soil Science Society of America, investigates food contamination coming from the soil where the plants grow. It all comes down to the chemistry of the soil, explains Seyfferth.
Most recently, Seyfferth has been studying rice. The elements arsenic and cadmium can be present in the paddies where rice is grown. She presented her research at the virtual 2020 ASA-CSSA-SSSA Annual Meeting.
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Arctic sea ice is rapidly diminishing due to global warming, and scientists have found that sea ice dynamics have a big impact on circulation and precipitation patterns in Arctic Alaska, which lies at a climatological crossroads between the Arctic and North Pacific Oceans. Recent studies most of which focus on current trends in the region and on what will happen in the future have shown that circulation patterns in the Arctic and North Pacific Oceans influence one another.
Doctoral candidate Ellie Broadman of Northern Arizona University s School of Earth and Sustainability wanted to learn about this relationship on a longer timescale, so she developed and led a study in Arctic Alaska to investigate it. She is the lead author on a paper detailing her team s findings, Coupled impacts of sea ice variability and North Pacific atmospheric circulation on Holocene hydroclimate in Arctic Alaska, which was recently published in the prestigious journal
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IMAGE: Flensburg meteorite with black fusion crust: Parts of the fusion crust were lost during the flight through the atmosphere. The small fragment, weighing 24,5 grams, is about 4.5 billion years. view more
Credit: A. Bischoff / M. Patzek, University of Münster
A meteorite that fell in northern Germany in 2019 contains carbonates which are among the oldest in the solar system; it also evidences the earliest presence of liquid water on a minor planet. The high-resolution Ion Probe - a research instrument at the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University - provided the measurements. The investigation by the Cosmochemistry Research Group led by Prof. Dr Mario Trieloff was part of a consortium study coordinated by the University of Münster with participating scientists from Europe, Australia and the USA.
Credit: Photo: Yuliya Bataleva
Diamond, like graphite, is a special form of carbon. Its cubic crystal structure and its strong chemical bonds give it its unique hardness. For thousands of years, it has also been sought after as both a tool and as a thing of beauty. Only in the 1950s did it become possible to produce diamonds artificially for the first time.
Most natural diamonds form in the Earth s mantle at depths of at least 150 kilometres, where temperatures in excess of 1500 degrees Celsius and enormously high pressures of several gigapascals prevail - more than 10.000 times that of a well-inflated bicycle tyre. There are different theories for the exact mechanisms that are responsible for their formation. The starting material is carbonate-rich melts, i.e. compounds of magnesium, calcium or silicon which are rich in both oxygen and carbon.
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IMAGE: Top left and the bottom right are Google Earth satellite images of the Brumadinho tailings dam taken before and after the collapse on 25 January 2019. Top right and bottom. view more
Credit: Google Earth
One of Brazil s worst environmental disasters - a dam collapse that also killed more than 200 people - could have been foreseen with the right monitoring technology, according to a new study by the University of Nottingham and Durham University.
The high-profile catastrophe took place on 25 January 2019 at a tailings dam near the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine, close to the town of Brumadinho, in Minas Gerais state, south-east Brazil.