Seawater located more than 2 km below the ocean’s surface drives the oceanic circulation that helps regulate the Earth’s climate. At these depths, turbulent mixing drives water towards the surface in a process called upwelling. How quickly this upwelling happens dictates how carbon and heat from the ocean are exchanged with the atmosphere. It has been difficult to directly test how carbon storage in the ocean is controlled by deep-sea mixing processes. But with the help of a non-toxic fluorescein dye, a research team headed up at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography has now direc ..read more

The increasing deployment of extensive space-based infrastructure is predicted to triple the number of objects in low-Earth orbit over the next century. But at the end of their service life, decommissioned satellites burn up as they re-enter the atmosphere, triggering chemical reactions that deplete the Earth’s ozone layer. Through new simulations, Joseph Wang and colleagues at the University of Southern California have shown how nanoparticles created by satellite pollution can catalyse chemical reactions between ozone and chlorine. If the problem isn’t addressed, they predict that the level o ..read more

The nuclear physicist Martin Freer is to be the next chief executive of the Faraday Institution – the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy-storage research. Freer, who is currently based at the University of Birmingham, will take up the role on 2 September. He replaces the condensed-matter physicist Pam Thomas, who stepped down in April after almost four years as boss. The Faraday Institution was set up in 2017 to help research scientists and industry experts to reduce the cost and weight of batteries and improve their performance and reliability. From its base at the Harwell ..read more

Water is a vital resource to society and is one of the main focus areas for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, around two thirds of the world still doesn’t have regular access to freshwater – with people in this category facing water scarcity for at least a month each year. Alongside, every two minutes a child dies from water-, sanitation- and hygiene-related diseases; and freshwater sources are becoming ever more polluted, causing further stress on water supplies. With many water-related challenges around the world, new ways of producing freshwater are being sought. In ..read more

A series of eruptions at the Hawaiian volcano Kilauea in 2018 may have been driven by a hitherto undescribed mechanism that resembles the “stomp-rocket” toys popular in science demonstrations. While these eruptions are the first in which scientists have identified such a mechanism, researchers at the University of Oregon, US, and the US Geological Survey say it may also occur in other so-called caldera collapse eruptions. Volcanic eruptions usually fall into one of two main categories. The first is magmatic eruptions, which (as their name implies) are driven by rising magma. The second is phre ..read more

Nikola Corporation is a US electric-vehicle company that once – briefly – had a market capitalization even greater than that of Ford. It was founded in 2014 by Trevor Milton, who served as chief executive and then executive chairperson when the company went public in 2020. In December 2023, however, Milton was jailed for four years after being found guilty on three counts of criminal fraud for lying about “nearly all aspects of the business”, as US federal investigators put it. Milton’s firm had also been slammed for excessive hype and fake promotional videos – one of which showed its prototyp ..read more

Earlier this year, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the US collapsed after being struck by a large container ship. Six people were killed in the disaster and many around the world were left wondering how such an important piece of infrastructure could collapse in such a catastrophic way. We investigate in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, which features Erin Bell and Martin Wosnick. They are both engineers at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and they are in conversation with Physics World’s Margaret Harris. Bell specializes in the structural design and dynamics of bridges a ..read more

Ancient organisms preserved in the Earth’s oldest fossils may have experienced a planetary magnetic field similar to the one we observe today. This finding, from a team of researchers at the University of Oxford, UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, suggests that the planet’s magnetic field was relatively strong 3.7 billion years ago – a fact with important consequences for early microbial Earthlings. “Our finding is interesting because the Sun was generating a much more intense solar wind in the Earth’s early history,” explains team leader Claire Nichols of Oxford’s Dep ..read more

New research suggests that laser-treated cork could be used to tackle crude oil spills. In a study published in Applied Physics Letters, researchers from China and Israel found that femtosecond laser processing alters the surface structure of cork so that it heats rapidly in sunlight and absorbs oil. Oil spills are ecological disasters that wreak havoc on marine ecosystems, with devastating, long lasting effects on marine animals and their habitats. Oil spill cleanup also presents a major technical challenge. There’s a lack of effective strategies for clearing water contaminated with high-visc ..read more

Travel to more than 350 astronomy meetings in 2019 resulted in the emission of 42 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s the conclusion of the first-ever study to examine the carbon emissions from travel to meetings by an entire field. The carbon cost amounts to about one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per participant per meeting – roughly Africa’s average per capita carbon footprint in 2019 (1.2 tCO2e) (PNAS Nexus 3 pgae143). Carried out by a team led by Andrea Gokus at Washington University in St. Louis in the US, the study examined 362 meetings in 2019 that were open to anyone in ..read more