Less than a year after the first research flight kicked off NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland campaign, data from the new program are providing a dramatic increase in knowledge of how Greenland’s ice sheet is melting from below. Two new research papers in the journal Oceanography, including one by UCI Earth system scientist Mathieu Morlighem, use…

A team of University of Colorado Boulder engineers has developed a scalable manufactured metamaterial — an engineered material with extraordinary properties not found in nature — to act as a kind of air conditioning system for structures. It has the ability to cool objects even under direct sunlight with zero energy and water consumption.

Those who take long showers use a great deal of water and energy. Yet people who enjoy taking long showers do not usually realize to what extent they are damaging the environment. However, if a clever measuring system shows current consumption, this immediately leads to increased efficiency. The consumption information available on the display is…

A brown cloud of air pollution now frequently shrouds much of northern India. It’s a growing regional health and environmental problem, and scientists are working to understand its many causes, which range from the burning of agricultural waste to auto emissions.

Ed Rivero-Valentin grew up in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, less than 15 minutes away from the jungle home of a 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope. When he was four or five, his parents brought him to the observatory for the first time. He saw the telescope’s mesh dish, resting inside a huge sinkhole in the soft rock formations that…

Geographer Tim DeVries and colleagues determine why the ocean has absorbed more carbon over the past decade. 

Building the wall that Donald Trump has ordered on January 25th, as one of his first actions as US president, will put on risk more than 50 animal species that share the ecosystem along the border between the United States and Mexico, scientists from various countries have warned. Since 2006, 1,100 kilometers of barriers covering more…

We’ve all known for a long time that eating fast food is bad for you. It’s greasy, fatty, high in sodium and the calorie count is obscene. Now comes news that even the packaging that food comes in might be dangerous to your health.A new study found dangerous chemical compounds in almost half of the 400 fast food containers it…

A researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences is providing fresh insights into the “Great Oxidation Event” (GOE), in which oxygen first appeared in the Earth’s atmosphere more than 2.3 billion years ago. 

The search for life beyond Earth starts in habitable zones, the regions around stars where conditions could potentially allow liquid water – which is essential for life as we know it – to pool on a planet’s surface. New NASA research suggests some of these zones might not actually be able to support life due…