YOUR WEEKLY BRIEFING FROM PARLEY
Above photo by Jeremy Bishop. Header photo from The Nuclear Weapon Archive.
OCEAN HEATING
With devastating events like the ongoing Australian fires happening more frequently, it’s becoming easier to visualise global heating as a visceral threat to the planet. But change in the oceans – which have absorbed 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases – is harder to picture. A new study released on Monday could change that.
“It’s about 5 Hiroshima bombs of heat, every second, day and night, 365 days a year,” explains John Abraham, a co-author of the study. He and the team found that 2019 was yet another year of record-setting ocean warming, with water temperatures reaching the highest temperature ever recorded.
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MICROPLASTIC POLLUTION
Researchers in the US have created the first “living machines” by assembling cells from frog eggs into tiny robots that move around under their own steam. One of the most successful ‘xenobots’ has two stumpy legs that propel it along, while another has a hole in the middle that researchers turned into a pouch so it could move around with miniature payloads. “These are entirely new lifeforms,” says Michael Levin from Tufts University. “They are living, programmable organisms.” Besides being entirely biodegradable, the xenobots’ unique features mean that future versions of the robots might be deployed to clean up microplastic pollution in the oceans, locate and digest toxic materials, deliver drugs in the body or remove plaque from artery walls, the researchers say.
INNOVATION
In the same week, researchers at the University of Colorado announced a radically different kind of concrete: one that is alive and can reproduce. Minerals in the new material are deposited not by chemistry but by cyanobacteria, a common class of microbes that capture energy through photosynthesis. The process absorbs carbon dioxide, in stark contrast to the production of regular concrete, which spews huge amounts of that greenhouse gas. The new blocks also have the advantage of being made from a variety of common materials. Most concrete requires virgin sand that comes from rivers, lakes and oceans, which is running short worldwide, but the new living material can be made from waste materials like ground glass or recycled concrete.
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THE DEEP SEA
Meanwhile, researchers in France have discovered that captured carbon dioxide can be used to extract useful metals from recycled technology like smartphone batteries. Beyond recovering valuable minerals, the technique could help make it more economical to capture CO2 before it enters the atmosphere. In a series of experiments, they successfully separated lanthanum, cobalt and nickel – all of which are used in batteries, smartphones and computers. If the process can be scaled up, it could be a more environmentally friendly way to recycle batteries and other electrical equipment – something normally done using highly reactive chemicals such as acids, which are potentially polluting. Improving the recovery of rare earth minerals could also be crucial to help reduce the incentive for ocean mining, which threatens deep sea ecosystems.
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CONSERVATION
A new United Nations proposal calls for national parks, marine sanctuaries and other protected areas to cover nearly one-third or more of the planet by 2030 as part of an effort to stop a sixth mass extinction and slow global warming. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity released the proposed targets on Monday in a first draft of what is expected to become an update to the global treaty on biodiversity later this year. It aims to halt species extinctions and also limit climate change by protecting critical wildlife habitat and conserving forests, grasslands and other carbon sinks. Ecologists hailed the plan as a good starting point, while simultaneously urging that more be done. Conserving more than 30% of the planet by 2030 will not be easy: only 15% of all land and 7% of oceans is currently protected, according to the United Nations.
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