Study Shows Underwater "Storms" Affecting Glacier

Swirling underwater "storms" are believed to have aggressively melted the ice shelves of two vital Antarctic glaciers, with potentially "far-reaching implications" for global sea level rise.

Antarctica is like a fist with a skinny thumb stuck out toward South America. Pine Island Glacier is near the base of this thumb. Thwaites — known as the Doomsday Glacier because of the devastating impact its demise would have on global sea level rise — sits next to it.

Over the past few decades, these icy giants have experienced rapid melting driven by warming ocean water, especially at the point where they rise from the seabed and come afloat as ice shelves.

The new study, published last month in Nature Geosciences, is the first to systematically analyze how the ocean is melting ice shelves over just hours and days, rather than seasons or years, its authors say.

"We are looking at the ocean on very short 'weather-like' timescales, which is unusual for Antarctic studies," said Yoshihiro Nakayama, a study author and an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth College.

The underwater storms they focused on — called submesoscales — are fast-changing, swirling ocean eddies.

"Think of these like little water twirls that spin around really fast, kind of like when you stir water in a cup," said study author Mattia Poinelli, an Earth system science researcher at the University of California, Irvine and a NASA research affiliate. However, in the ocean, these eddies are not small — they can span up to around 6 miles.

They form when warm and cold water meet. To return to the cup analogy, it’s the same principle as when you pour milk into a cup of coffee and see tiny swirls spinning around, mixing everything together.

The phenomenon is similar to how storms form in the atmosphere — when warm and cold air collide — and like atmospheric storms, they can be very dangerous.

The eddies spin up in the open ocean and race underneath ice shelves. Sandwiched between the complex, rough base of the ice shelf and the seafloor, the eddies churn up warmer water from deeper in the ocean, which enhances melting when it "hits" vulnerable ice, Nakayama said.

The scientists used computer models as well as real-world data from ocean instruments to analyze the impact of these underwater storms.

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Romans Used Volcanic Ash ‘Hot-Mix’ As Concrete

Roman concrete is often hailed as a major engineering feat. It has allowed the Empire’s monumental structures to remain standing for two thousand years.

Many of the buildings, bridges, and aqueducts built by Roman architects are still operational.

Now, a new discovery at a perfectly preserved Pompeii construction site has revealed the long-held secret behind this legendary longevity.

"We were blessed to be able to open this time capsule of a construction site and find piles of material ready to be used for the wall. With this paper, we wanted to clearly define a technology and associate it with the Roman period in the year 79 C.E.," said MIT Associate Professor Admir Masic, who led the research.

The team uncovered the Romans' "hot-mixing" technique.

In hot-mixing, lime fragments, volcanic ash, and other dry ingredients were mixed before water was added, generating heat.

The intense heat generated during the mixing trapped highly reactive lime as tiny, gravel-like "clasts" within the concrete. When cracks inevitably formed over thousands of years, these lime clasts dissolved, actively filling and repairing the damage.

In this new research, Masic’s team analyzed an exquisitely preserved ancient construction site in Pompeii, unearthed from the 79 C.E. eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The study involved analyzing samples from various construction stages: pre-mixed raw materials, a wall being built, completed walls (buttress and structural), and mortar used for repairs.

The Pompeii construction site provided the most definitive proof that the Romans employed hot-mixing for concrete.

Concrete samples from the site contained the characteristic self-healing lime clasts. The team also discovered intact quicklime fragments, pre-mixed with other dry ingredients, in a raw material pile, confirming the vital first step of the hot-mixing process.

"These results revealed that the Romans prepared their binding material by taking calcined limestone (quicklime), grinding them to a certain size, mixing it dry with volcanic ash, and then eventually adding water to create a cementing matrix," Masic noted.

The site also yielded a treasure trove of information about the volcanic ash itself.

Pumice particles, reacting with the concrete’s internal environment over time, created new mineral deposits, further strengthening the material.

This process significantly enhances the concrete’s long-term strength and its capacity for self-repair years after the monumental Roman structures were initially built.

"This material can heal itself over thousands of years, it is reactive, and it is highly dynamic. It has survived earthquakes and volcanoes. It has endured under the sea and survived degradation from the elements," said Masic.

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A New Recyclable Building Material That Absorbs CO2

Robots may not be pouring concrete yet, but biological chemistry just might, thanks to a new material that captures carbon instead of emitting it.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers have developed a carbon-negative building material that could reshape what sustainable construction looks like.

The team has created enzymatic structural material, or ESM, a durable, moldable, and recyclable substance produced through a low-energy, bioinspired process.

The breakthrough comes from work led by Nima Rahbar, the Ralph H. White Family Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at WPI.

Rahbar’s team used an enzyme that transforms carbon dioxide into solid mineral particles. Those particles are then bound and cured under mild conditions, allowing the mixture to form structural components within hours.

That speed alone sets it apart. Traditional concrete demands high temperatures and weeks of curing. ESM forms far faster, and with a fraction of the environmental impact.

Rahbar says the global dependence on concrete urgently needs rethinking.

"Concrete is the most widely used construction material on the planet, and its production accounts for nearly 8 percent of global CO2 emissions," he said. He added that the new method "doesn’t just reduce emissions—it actually captures carbon."

According to the researchers, producing a single cubic meter of ESM sequesters more than 6 kilograms of CO2.

In contrast, the same amount of conventional concrete emits around 330 kilograms.

Beyond emissions, ESM’s ability to cure quickly, adjust in strength, and be recycled makes it a candidate for applications such as wall panels, roof decks, and modular building parts.

Its repairability could also reduce the long-term costs of upkeep, an often overlooked component of construction waste.

"If even a fraction of global construction shifts toward carbon-negative materials like ESM, the impact could be enormous," Rahbar said.

The potential applications stretch far beyond everyday buildings. Lightweight, fast-forming, and low-energy structural materials are valuable in disaster relief zones, where speed can shape recovery.

ESM could also play a role in affordable housing, climate-resilient infrastructure, and circular manufacturing systems that prioritize recycling over disposal.

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Pi Formula Is More Than Just Math

More than a hundred years ago, long before anyone imagined supercomputers or black hole simulations, there was one legendary Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan who wrote down a set of formulas to calculate the digits of π (pi).

These equations, just 17 short expressions, were mysterious even to mathematicians of his time, as they produced incredibly accurate digits of pi using very few mathematical steps. Today, pi has been computed to over 200 trillion digits, using algorithms whose foundations trace back to Ramanujan’s ideas.

However, a new study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has revealed something far more surprising. It suggests that Ramanujan’s old mathematical tricks are not just clever; they naturally appear in modern physics, popping up in models that describe turbulence, percolation, and even aspects of black holes.

"Ramanujan’s motivation might have been very mathematical, but without his knowledge, he was also studying black holes, turbulence, percolation, all sorts of things," Faizan Bhat, first author of the study and an ex-PhD candidate at IISc, said.

The study authors focused on a simple but deep question. Why do Ramanujan’s formulas work so beautifully? Mathematicians have admired the formulas for more than a century, and they form the basis for modern pi-computing methods such as the Chudnovsky algorithm, but their origin has always felt almost magical.

Instead of looking for a purely mathematical answer, the researchers tried something new. What if Ramanujan’s mathematics naturally arises from physical laws? In other words, could there be a real physical system where these formulas appear without being forced in?

To find out, they searched through different areas of high-energy theory. Their attention settled on conformal field theories (CFTs)—powerful frameworks used to describe systems that look the same no matter how much you zoom in. A well-known example is the critical point of water, where liquid and vapor become identical, and the system shows repeating behavior.

Within this large family, they looked at a special subset called logarithmic conformal field theories (LCFTs). LCFTs describe phenomena right at the edge of order and chaos, places where small changes ripple outward dramatically.

These include percolation (how things spread or seep through a network or material), turbulence onset (when smooth fluid flow suddenly breaks into chaotic eddies), and certain black hole descriptions, where spacetime behaves in exotic ways.

Using detailed mathematical examination, the researchers discovered that the starting structure of Ramanujan’s pi formulae, the part that sets up how the series expands, exactly matches the structure that appears in LCFTs.

Once they recognized the match, they used Ramanujan’s mathematical machinery to compute complicated quantities inside these physical theories. Calculating these values normally requires long, heavy computations, but Ramanujan’s approach—which was originally designed to compute digits of pi swiftly—allowed them to do it much faster and more efficiently.

This created a perfect mirror. Just as Ramanujan used a simple starting expression to generate many accurate digits of pi, the physicists used the same underlying structure to generate accurate physical predictions in LCFTs with surprisingly little effort.

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Ancient Norwegian Reindeer Trap Discovered

Some researchers believed that the changing climate is a key factor in uncovering jaw-dropping artifacts from over 1,000 years ago.

As Live Science reported, archaeologists in Norway discovered a 1,500-year-old reindeer trap made of hundreds of wooden logs. The ancient structure was revealed by melting ice in the Aurlandsfjellet mountains.

Alongside the trap, the researchers found other artifacts, including reindeer antlers, iron spearheads, and wooden arrows. The discovery has provided new insights into ancient hunting practices in the region.

"This is the first time a mass-capture facility made of wood has been revealed from the ice in Norway, and the facility is probably also unique in a European context," according to a Vestland County Municipality news release.

Archaeologist Øystein Skår added: "This finding makes us certain that the facility was used for mass hunting. All antlers have markings, which gives us deeper insight into the hunting activity itself."

According to Skår, cold temperatures meant the tool stayed covered in snow year-round. And based on how well-preserved the antlers were, this ice encasement process happened quickly following its use by ancient Norwegians.

Over time, it was buried in even more ice and snow, securing the device in an icy tomb for centuries. However, because of rising global temperatures and steadily melting ice, these artifacts have now seen the light of day for the first time in 1,500 years.

Ice and snow each have a high albedo, meaning they are highly reflective. Their surfaces are able to bounce sunlight and heat back into space, helping to cool the planet. But as heat-trapping pollution continues to fill the atmosphere and raise temperatures, ice and snow are melting at rapid paces, diminishing their abilities to absorb solar energy and heat. This creates a feedback loop that accelerates the warming.

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One Time, Two Early Humans Coexisted

In a groundbreaking discovery in early human evolution, scientists revealed that, using the "Burtele Foot" and the "Lucy fossil," they identified two hominin species that coexisted at the same place and time.

Back in 1974, scientists discovered 40 percent of a single hominin skeleton known as Lucy at the Hadar site in Ethiopia, which rose to prominence as the most complete early human ancestor ever found. Many years later, in 2009, another "enigmatic" hominin foot, Burtele, was discovered nearby at the Afar Rift.

Though researchers understood that the two human remains did not belong to the same species, Burtele Foot remained unclassified until recently, when researchers unearthed more fossils that helped solve the mystery. Lucy had already been categorized as a separate hominin, A. afarensis.

In 2015, a team at Arizona State University announced yet another human ancestor, Australopithecus deyiremeda, to which it would turn out Burtele’s Foot also belonged. The evidence added up.

Researchers could then conclude that 3.5 million years ago, at a "poorly understood time in human evolution," according to Reuters, two different hominins lived alongside one another, though they did not walk alike.

A team from ASU recently unearthed a new set of fossils: 25 teeth and a jawbone. Based on what they gleaned from the new evidence, Burtele, composed of eight-foot bones once attached to a very early hominin species, A. deyiremeda, which possessed both ape-like and human-like traits, according to Reuters.

Now that researchers know that Burtele and Lucy were distinct species, the Woranso-Mille site has become significant as the only location in the world where scientists have identified the coexistence of two hominin species with distinct characteristics.

The Burtele Foot retained an opposable big toe, according to a press release by Arizona State University News, which would have assisted this early human in climbing, with longer, more flexible toes. When it walked on two legs, it most likely pushed off its second digit rather than the big toe as we modern humans do today. Lucy’s species, A. afarensis, was fully bipedal with an abducted big toe. Researchers gleaned that early humans walked differently.

"So what that means is that bipedality — walking on two legs — in these early human ancestors came in various forms. The whole idea of finding specimens like the Burtele Foot tells you that there were many ways of walking on two legs when on the ground; there was not just one way until later."

Isotope analysis, furthermore, if not surprisingly, showed that the two species did not dine alike either. "I think the biggest surprise was despite ... how diverse these early australopith (early hominin) species were — in their size, in their diet, in their locomotor repertoires and in their anatomy — [they] seem to be remarkably similar in the manner in which they grew up," said Haile-Selassie, director of the Institute of Human Origins and professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU.

Studying how these ancient ancestors moved and what they ate gives scientists insight into how different species lived together without one driving the other to extinction.

"If we don’t understand our past, we can’t fully understand the present or our future. What happened in the past, we see it happening today," he said.

"In a lot of ways, the climate change that we see today has happened so many times during the times of Lucy and A. deyiremeda. What we learn from that time could actually help us mitigate some of the worst outcomes of climate change today."

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Radiation Waste Converted Into Cancer-Fighting Isotope

Scientists recently found a way to convert high-energy radiation waste from particle accelerators into a critically scarce medical isotope used in cancer therapy.

The intense beams of particles inside accelerators, typically focused on unlocking the deepest secrets of the universe, eventually collide with a component called a "beam dump." This is where the leftover energy — massive amounts of radiation — is absorbed and usually dissipated as waste heat.

The photons in a particle accelerator’s beam dump are intense, high-energy radiation byproducts of the main physics experiment.

A team of researchers at the University of York states that this powerful radiation, specifically the photons, can be captured and repurposed. It can be utilized to create materials necessary for cancer treatment.

The target isotope, copper-67, is a highly valuable asset in oncology. The method shows potential for generating this rare isotope, which is used for both diagnosing and treating cancer.

"We have shown the potential to generate copper-67, a rare isotope used in both diagnosing and treating cancers, by demonstrating that what we might view as waste from a particle accelerator experiment can be turned into something that can save lives," said Dr. Mamad Eslami, a nuclear physicist from the University of York’s School of Physics, Engineering and Technology.

In nuclear medicine, medical isotopes are the key tools—they emit radiation used to both diagnose and treat diseases. Because they aren’t abundant in nature, these isotopes have to be produced synthetically.

Copper-67 is a highly valuable medical isotope because it functions as a theranostic agent, meaning it can both treat and track disease simultaneously.

Specifically, it emits radiation that is effective at destroying cancer cells, while also releasing radiation that allows doctors to monitor the treatment’s progress and assess its location using diagnostic imaging. This dual capability makes it exceptionally useful in personalized cancer care.

Clinical trials are currently investigating its use against aggressive diseases like neuroblastoma and prostate cancer.

However, the global supplies of Copper-67 are severely restricted because current production methods rely on expensive, dedicated accelerator time and often use aging infrastructure.

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