Emma Bryce

1 week ago | livescience.com | Emma Bryce

Sperm cells have a monumental task, but their days are numbered. From the moment they're made in the testes to the time they may spend winding their way up the labyrinthine of the female reproductive tract, their internal clocks are ticking. So exactly how long do human sperm survive, in order to complete this journey? The answer depends on where the sperm is and conditions such as temperature, moisture and energy levels.

2 weeks ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Emma Bryce

Farms of the future face rising sea levels, flooding of fertile land, and increasingly saline soils that will undermine yields. But what if farmers could work with this changing landscape? A new perspective published in Ambio explores how growers in some landscapes could switch to seagrass in an increasingly marine future. Cultivated at scale, seagrass meadows could produce grain in quantities equivalent to 7% of global rice production, with potentially zero emissions, the new perspective says.

2 weeks ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Sarah DeWeerdt |Emma Bryce

Boosting iron intake to fight weakness and increase energy is not just for humans, new research shows. A team of scientists and engineers have found that injecting iron and other minerals into wood makes it stronger without making it heavier. By making wood more competitive with steel and cement, the finding presented in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces offers a route to make modern construction more sustainable.

3 weeks ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Emma Bryce

New research from Ireland adds to the mounting evidence that bivalve aquaculture can provide benefits for climate and nutrition. The recent study finds that Irish oyster farms remove 228% more nutrients than they produce, provide coastal cleanup to the value of $2 million, and lock away tons of carbon in their shells.

3 weeks ago | anthropocenemagazine.org | Sarah DeWeerdt |Emma Bryce

Human waste contains many valuable nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. That makes it a promising potential fertilizer with a lower carbon footprint than today’s fertilizers. But human waste is also a promising source of untapped energy. And in the latest attempt to tap that energy, researchers have developed a low-cost, efficient way to produce clean hydrogen fuel from human urine. They present this work in the journal Nature Communications.