“Coral reef restoration in the Maldives is taking a pioneering step forwards thanks to a cross-collaborative effort between local marine biologists and scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science that has engaged groundbreaking new technology to enable reef restoration in some of the world’s most remote underwater locations.

Using this pioneering new, portable reef aquaculture system – one known as ReefSeed – researchers from the Maldives Marine Research Initiative (MMRI) have now successfully reared more than three million larvae and deployed more than 10,000 juvenile corals on 720 seeding devices at nine different reef locations.”

From Oceanographic Magazine.

“More than 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with global warming and competing demands from farms and industry expected to worsen shortages. But the skies may soon provide relief, not in the form of rain but humidity, sucked out of the air by ‘atmospheric water harvesters.’ The devices have existed for decades but typically are too expensive, energy-hungry, or unproductive to be practical.

Now, however, two classes of materials called hydrogels and metal-organic frameworks have touched off what Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls ‘an explosion of efforts related to atmospheric water harvesting.’ …

In 2023 [University of California, Berkeley chemist Omar Yaghi] and his colleagues reported an aluminum-based MOF that was cheap to make in bulk and that could wring water from desert air. In preliminary, unpublished tests, Yaghi says, prototype devices using a tweaked version of his team’s MOF can produce 200 liters of water per kilogram per day with only small amounts of added heat.

Yaghi has licensed the technology to Atoco, which is exploring using it to generate water to cool data centers, harnessing their waste heat to speed the cycling. Atoco plans to open pilot scale facilities in Texas and Arizona next year to test scaled-up versions.”

From Science.

“The reported emissions of all pollutants were lower in 2023 than in 2005. For the main pollutants, SOX emissions have reduced the most (in percentage terms) both since 2005 (by 84%) and since 2022 (by 14%). This is followed by NOX, which reduced by 53% since 2005 and by 5% since 2022. NMVOCs reduced by 35% since 2005 and by 4% since 2022. NH3 reduced by 17% since 2005, while the emissions did not reduce since 2022. PM2.5 reduced by 38% since 2005 and by 6% since 2022.”

From European Environment Agency.

“Scientists at the University of Cambridge have identified a family of bacterial species, found naturally in the human gut, that absorb various PFAS molecules from their surroundings.  When nine of these bacterial species were introduced into the guts of mice to ‘humanise’ the mouse microbiome, the bacteria rapidly accumulated PFAS eaten by the mice – which were then excreted in faeces.

The researchers also found that as the mice were exposed to increasing levels of PFAS, the microbes worked harder, consistently removing the same percentage of the toxic chemicals. Within minutes of exposure, the bacterial species tested soaked up between 25% and 74% of the PFAS.

The results are the first evidence that our gut microbiome could play a helpful role in removing toxic PFAS chemicals from our body – although this has not yet been directly tested in humans.

The researchers plan to use their discovery to create probiotic dietary supplements that boost the levels of these helpful microbes in our gut, to protect against the toxic effects of PFAS.”

From Cambridge University.