Explore the latest insights from top science journals in the Muser Press daily roundup (May 21, 2025), featuring impactful research on climate change challenges.
In brief:
First-of-its-kind global study shows grasslands can withstand climate extremes with a boost of nutrients
Fertilizer might be stronger than we thought. A new international study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, featuring faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York found that fertilizer can help plants survive short-term periods of extreme drought, findings which could have implications for agriculture and food systems in a world facing climate stressors.
“Resources such as nutrients and water have been fundamentally altered by humans on a global scale, and this can disrupt how plants grow,” said Amber Churchill, an assistant professor of ecosystem science at Binghamton University and co-author on the study. “Extreme changes in these resources are therefore predicted to have an even larger potential impact, with implications for a range of economic sectors. This is especially true for global grasslands, where resource availability for water and nutrients directly supports livestock and pastoralism on all inhabited continents.”
To address this issue, the researchers assessed how grasslands respond to extreme drought and increased nutrient availability through field experiments at 26 sites across 9 countries.
“It took what are often very site-specific methodologies, where we’re interested in the impacts of nutrients or the impacts of drought and water availability, and it scaled a single site experiment up to something at a much larger spatial scale,” said Churchill. “The ability to test both variation in nutrients, as well as this global change driver of impacts of drought in combination at such a huge spatial extent – that’s the really novel aspect of this experiment.”
The researchers added nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium – essential nutrients that all plants need – as well as a one-time addition of a series of micronutrients. They found that while drought alone reduced plant growth by 19%, adding fertilizer increased plant growth by 24%. Importantly, the combination of the two resulted in no net change in growth, largely driven by grasses that were able to take advantage of the added nutrients even under drought.
“The really big takeaway is that adding nutrients can offset the impact of drought, and this is really true in areas that are already pretty dry,” said Churchill.
Churchill worked at two of the 26 sites. At the Yarramundi site at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment of Western Sydney University, she managed data, recording the number of plants present in the area. At the Cedar Creek Long Term Ecological Research Site in Minnesota, she was in charge of cleaning all data and organizing it to be shared with the network of researchers.
“In terms of drought, we get less growth; we add fertilizer, we get more growth. As you’re seeing some of those idiosyncrasies, the sort of follow-up lines are where it gets a little bit more interesting,” said Churchill. “Traditionally, we might hypothesize that if plants are already limited by water at, say, an arid site, plants may not be able to respond to adding nitrogen. But we actually found the opposite of that, where plants are able to better respond to the nitrogen addition under these more arid conditions. And so that’s a really sort of a striking difference than what we might have expected.”
Churchill will be creating similar treatments at Binghamton University as part of the Pasture and Lawn Enhanced Diversity Global-change Experiment (PLEDGE), at Nuthatch Hollow, a 75-acre, “open-air lab” at Binghamton University.
While adding fertilizer might temporarily offset the effects of drought, said Churchill, it’s not a feasible long-term solution.
“In a forage production system where you need to offset the effects of drought, adding fertilizer will remove that effective drought,” she said. “That’s a great benefit, but that costs a lot of money. So there’s a tradeoff there. It can be a tool used, but it’s not going to be the long-term solution.”
Churchill said that in terms of management, the number of plant species growing might be a more important factor in surviving drought.
“We have a prediction that as you have more species, one of those species is more likely to withstand the drought, so you’ll get at least some biomass, even if each species doesn’t make it. And so the idea is you’ll have more stable biomass over the long term if you have more species present. That’s something we can’t test with this data set, because we’re only looking at one year. But longer-term data sets can look at that sort of a question.”
Journal Reference:
Bondaruk, V.F., Xu, C., Wilfahrt, P. et al., ‘Aridity modulates grassland biomass responses to combined drought and nutrient addition’, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-025-02705-8
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by John Brhel | Binghamton University
Landmark report reveals key challenges facing adolescents
The landmark report, by experts in adolescent health including from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI), has revealed how supporting young people’s health and wellbeing could improve economic, social and public health for generations to come.
The 2025 Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing found investment in adolescents’ health and wellbeing doesn’t match the scale of the problems faced by young people. Bringing together 44 Commissioners and 10 Youth Commissioners, the Commission stated while adolescents make up 24 per cent of the population (about two billion people), they receive just 2.4 per cent of global development and health funding.
By 2030, more than half of adolescents will be living in countries where their demographic experiences an excess burden of complex disease.
The report found the ongoing challenges faced by this age group included:
- High cases of poor mental health and limited support services
- Increasing rates of obesity due to complex environmental and commercial factors
- Lack of digital safety and exposure to cyberbullying and misinformation
- Experiencing violence in conflict-affected areas and within the home
- Ongoing fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures
- Widening gaps in reproductive rights, particularly for young women
- Environmental challenges and climate change impacts
Published in The Lancet, the report predicted that by 2050, 70 per cent of the world’s adolescents will be living in urban areas. While this potentially brings benefits, rapid unplanned urbanisation may also accelerate poverty, isolation and insecure housing, it found.
The report stated that urban, public spaces should be more amenable and tailored to young people, such as safe and engaging spaces to congregate, which would have a powerful effect on health outcomes.
It also found urgent action was required to better protect young people from violence and ensure equitable access to education and reproductive rights. Almost half of adolescents have experienced violence, profoundly impacting their social and emotional development and wellbeing. Whilst global efforts have largely closed the gender gap in high school education, by 2030, almost a third of young women will not be in post-secondary education, employment or training.
MCRI Professor Peter Azzopardi said there was a great need for targeted actions that focused on early intervention.
“Meaningful, evidence-based, multi-sector partnerships with young people will be the key to improving health and wellbeing,” he said. “But we must remain accountable by ensuring that any progress is monitored closely and reported on regularly. As our population ages and fertility rates decline, the health of our adolescents becomes even more crucuial.”
Potential solutions and actions outlined included:
- Advocating for change and amplifying the needs and voices of young people
- Developing goal-centred approaches through the Office of the UN Secretary with a focus on measuring and improving adolescent health and wellbeing
- Involving young people in community-based environmental programs
- Scaling up public health programs that improve sexual and reproductive health outcomes and reduce gender-based violence
- Strengthening actions within health and education sectors while reinforcing collaborations
- Limiting the exposure of advertising targeting adolescents
- Promoting and encouraging the healthy use of social media and online spaces
MCRI Professor Susan Sawyer said partnerships with young people were a cornerstone of the report, which aimed to draw on their capability and leadership to help shape the world they wanted to live in.
“This report represents a wealth of current information about the state of our young people’s health,” she said. “The findings are alarming and they demand urgent action and accountability, in collaboration with adolescents, to create safer spaces and meaningful change.”
But Professor Sawyer said lack of national leadership around adolescent health remained a major barrier to overcoming the challenges.
“A common myth is that adolescents are healthy and therefore don’t need health services,” she said. “Yet our findings show that in every country, adolescents need access to responsive health services that can confidentially identify and respond to their emerging health needs.”
The report will be launched at the World Health Organization’s 78th Health Assembly in Geneva.
Journal Reference:
Sarah Baird, Shakira Choonara, Peter S Azzopardi, Prerna Banati, Judith Bessant, Olivia Biermann, Anthony Capon, Mariam Claeson, Pamela Y Collins, Nicole De Wet-Billings, Surabhi Dogra, Yanhui Dong, Kate L Francis, Luwam T Gebrekristos, Allison K Groves, Simon I Hay, David Imbago-Jacome, Aaron P Jenkins, Caroline W Kabiru, Elissa C Kennedy, Luo Li, Chunling Lu et al., ‘A call to action: the second Lancet Commission on adolescent health and wellbeing’, The Lancet (2025). DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(25)00503-3. Also available on ScienceDirect.
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Murdoch Childrens Research Institute
Sex-specific climate responses in plants reveal flaws in biodiversity forecasts
As global warming alters ecosystems, the need to predict the reorganization of Earth’s biodiversity has become urgent. New research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, suggests that neglecting the ecological differences between male and female plants can lead to inaccurate biodiversity forecasts.
The study led by Jacob Moutouama, a postdoctoral research associate at Rice University and lead author, highlights the need to refine biodiversity forecasts to account for the sex-specific responses to Earth’s rapidly changing climate.
Many plant and animal species are dioecious, meaning they have distinct male and female individuals. Traditional biodiversity models often overlook this distinction, potentially missing key differences in climate sensitivity.
The research team conducted field experiments and developed mathematical models for the dioecious plant species Texas bluegrass (Poa arachnifera) to explore how sex-specific traits affect the species’ ability to respond to environmental change.
“Tracking both sexes can be twice the work, which is why most ecologists don’t do it. But our findings show that failing to account for the dynamics of both sexes could underestimate species’ vulnerability to climate change,” said Tom Miller, associate professor of biosciences who supervised the research.
Modeling female and male responses
The researchers created two modeling frameworks: a conventional female-dominant model and a new two-sex model that incorporates feedback between sex ratios and reproductive rates. Through common garden experiments across Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, they assessed how climate sensitivities differ by sex and how this affects future distribution.
Both models predicted a poleward shift in suitable habitats under future climate scenarios, but the female-only model underestimated this shift. While female plants tolerate a wider range of temperatures, populations with more females may face reduced reproduction due to limited mating opportunities.
This research addresses a gap in ecological forecasting — assuming that male and female individuals respond similarly to environmental stressors. Integrating field data into mathematical models is essential for enhancing forecast accuracy, Miller said.
“It turns out that collecting demographic data across an entire species range is incredibly challenging, which is likely why few have attempted this before,” he said.
Conservation implications
The findings suggest that for dioecious species such as Texas bluegrass, “the future is female,” according to the study. Global warming may increase female dominance, challenging previous studies that predicted male advantages. Understanding these sex-specific climate responses could lead to better conservation strategies for vulnerable species.
Neglecting sex structure could undermine efforts to maintain healthy ecosystems, underscoring the complexities of population biology that affect species survival, Moutouama said.
“Understanding the real-world complexity of population structure helps us anticipate and prepare for changes in biodiversity,” he said.
***
The study, co-authored by Aldo Compagnoni of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, received support from the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology.
Journal Reference:
J.K. Moutouama, A. Compagnoni, & T.E.X. Miller, ‘Forecasting range shifts of dioecious plants under climate change’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122 (21) e2422162122 (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422162122
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Marcy de Luna | Rice University
How to solve a bottleneck for CO2 capture and conversion
Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere efficiently is often seen as a crucial need for combatting climate change, but systems for removing carbon dioxide suffer from a tradeoff. Chemical compounds that efficiently remove CO2 from the air do not easily release it once captured, and compounds that release CO2 efficiently are not very efficient at capturing it. Optimizing one part of the cycle tends to make the other part worse.
Now, using nanoscale filtering membranes, researchers at MIThave added a simple intermediate step that facilitates both parts of the cycle. The new approach could improve the efficiency of electrochemical carbon dioxide capture and release by six times and cut costs by at least 20 percent, they say.
The new findings are reported in the journal ACS Energy Letters, in a paper by MIT doctoral students Simon Rufer, Tal Joseph, and Zara Aamer, and professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.
“We need to think about scale from the get-go when it comes to carbon capture, as making a meaningful impact requires processing gigatons of CO2,” says Varanasi. “Having this mindset helps us pinpoint critical bottlenecks and design innovative solutions with real potential for impact. That’s the driving force behind our work.”
Many carbon-capture systems work using chemicals called hydroxides, which readily combine with carbon dioxide to form carbonate. That carbonate is fed into an electrochemical cell, where the carbonate reacts with an acid to form water and release carbon dioxide. The process can take ordinary air with only about 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide and generate a stream of 100 percent pure carbon dioxide, which can then be used to make fuels or other products.
Both the capture and release steps operate in the same water-based solution, but the first step needs a solution with a high concentration of hydroxide ions, and the second step needs one high in carbonate ions. “You can see how these two steps are at odds,” says Varanasi. “These two systems are circulating the same sorbent back and forth. They’re operating on the exact same liquid. But because they need two different types of liquids to operate optimally, it’s impossible to operate both systems at their most efficient points.”
The team’s solution was to decouple the two parts of the system and introduce a third part in between. Essentially, after the hydroxide in the first step has been mostly chemically converted to carbonate, special nanofiltration membranes then separate ions in the solution based on their charge. Carbonate ions have a charge of 2, while hydroxide ions have a charge of 1. “The nanofiltration is able to separate these two pretty well,” Rufer says.
Once separated, the hydroxide ions are fed back to the absorption side of the system, while the carbonates are sent ahead to the electrochemical release stage. That way, both ends of the system can operate at their more efficient ranges. Varanasi explains that in the electrochemical release step, protons are being added to the carbonate to cause the conversion to carbon dioxide and water, but if hydroxide ions are also present, the protons will react with those ions instead, producing just water.
“If you don’t separate these hydroxides and carbonates,” Rufer says, “the way the system fails is you’ll add protons to hydroxide instead of carbonate, and so you’ll just be making water rather than extracting carbon dioxide. That’s where the efficiency is lost. Using nanofiltration to prevent this was something that we aren’t aware of anyone proposing before.”
Testing showed that the nanofiltration could separate the carbonate from the hydroxide solution with about 95 percent efficiency, validating the concept under realistic conditions, Rufer says. The next step was to assess how much of an effect this would have on the overall efficiency and economics of the process. They created a techno-economic model, incorporating electrochemical efficiency, voltage, absorption rate, capital costs, nanofiltration efficiency, and other factors.
The analysis showed that present systems cost at least $600 per ton of carbon dioxide captured, while with the nanofiltration component added, that drops to about $450 a ton. What’s more, the new system is much more stable, continuing to operate at high efficiency even under variations in the ion concentrations in the solution.
“In the old system without nanofiltration, you’re sort of operating on a knife’s edge,” Rufer says; if the concentration varies even slightly in one direction or the other, efficiency drops off drastically. “But with our nanofiltration system, it kind of acts as a buffer where it becomes a lot more forgiving. You have a much broader operational regime, and you can achieve significantly lower costs.”
He adds that this approach could apply not only to the direct air capture systems they studied specifically, but also to point-source systems — which are attached directly to the emissions sources such as power plant emissions — or to the next stage of the process, converting captured carbon dioxide into useful products such as fuel or chemical feedstocks. Those conversion processes, he says, “are also bottlenecked in this carbonate and hydroxide tradeoff.”
In addition, this technology could lead to safer alternative chemistries for carbon capture, Varanasi says. “A lot of these absorbents can at times be toxic, or damaging to the environment. By using a system like ours, you can improve the reaction rate, so you can choose chemistries that might not have the best absorption rate initially but can be improved to enable safety.”
Varanasi adds that “the really nice thing about this is we’ve been able to do this with what’s commercially available,” and with a system that can easily be retrofitted to existing carbon-capture installations. If the costs can be further brought down to about $200 a ton, it could be viable for widespread adoption. With ongoing work, he says, “we’re confident that we’ll have something that can become economically viable” and that will ultimately produce valuable, saleable products.
Rufer notes that even today, “people are buying carbon credits at a cost of over $500 per ton. So, at this cost we’re projecting, it is already commercially viable in that there are some buyers who are willing to pay that price.” But by bringing the price down further, that should increase the number of buyers who would consider buying the credit, he says. “It’s just a question of how widespread we can make it.” Recognizing this growing market demand, Varanasi says, “Our goal is to provide industry scalable, cost-effective, and reliable technologies and systems that enable them to directly meet their decarbonization targets.”
***
The research was supported by Shell International Exploration and Production Inc. through the MIT Energy Initiative, and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and made use of the facilities at MIT.nano.
Journal Reference:
Simon Rufer, Tal Joseph, Zara Aamer, and Kripa K. Varanasi, ‘Carbonate/Hydroxide Separation Boosts CO2 Absorption Rate and Electrochemical Release Efficiency’, ACS Energy Letters online, 10, 2752–2760 (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.5c00893
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by David L. Chandler / MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Featured image credit: Gerd Altmann | Pixabay
