Effects of Climate Change on the Interaction Between Soil Organic and Inorganic Carbon in Global Drylands - Wiley Online Library

As the world gets hotter, many of its driest regions are expected to get even drier. When this happens, the boundaries of arid regions are expected to creep forward, transforming landscapes and killing off plant life no longer able to cope. Amidst the changes, projections suggest Earth's drylands could grow to cover over 40 percent of the planet's land area by the end of the 21st century, according to a new study in Environmental Research Letters. But in a surprise twist, the most prominent contributor to climate change – rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels – may actually be slowing the expansion of Earth's drylands, researchers say. Drylands are regions that face great water scarcity, where precipitation is low relative to the potential loss of water through evaporation and plant transpiration. While the concept is well established, and scientists broadly agree on where the world's major drylands lie, differences in measurement techniques and climate data mean global estimates of Earth's dryland coverage can vary substantially. As the new paper urges, there are good reasons to find common ground.

Soon, it'll be all Starship, all the time.

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) have developed a new way to make glowing biological reporters more accurate, allowing scientists to track gene activity in living plants over days, weeks and potentially even months and years. The approach could help researchers study how plants respond to disease, pests and environmental stress, while opening the door to similar applications in animal and human disease models.

The latest in space science: We look back at the Big Bang In this edition of Spacing Out, the team from Short Wave shares the latest developments in space science, including the theory on why the universe is made of matter In this edition of Spacing Out, the team from Short Wave discusses the latest space science news

A molecular modeling approach identifies boron- and oxygen-containing diamond defects as promising candidates for quantum technologies. The calculations focus on small atomic clusters while retaining the surrounding crystal’s influence, making sophisticated quantum chemistry more manageable. The predictions help screen candidates, but practical qubit performance still requires tests of coherence, stability and other properties. Tiny imperfections in diamond could offer new ways to store and read quantum information. The challenge is deciding which defects deserve the time and expense of experimental testing. A computational study now brings tools from molecular chemistry to that search, identifying promising boron- and oxygen-containing candidates. John Mark P. Martirez, a staff research scientist at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, reports the work in ACS Central Science. His approach concentrates demanding calculations on a small group of atoms surrounding a defect. Crucially, the model still accounts for the influence of the diamond crystal beyond that group.