Explore the latest insights from top science journals in the Muser Press roundup (March 3, 2026), featuring impactful research on climate change challenges.
In brief:
— Press Release —
From trash to climate tech: rubber gloves find new life as carbon capturers materials
Every year, over 100 billion nitrile rubber gloves are produced. They are made from synthetic polymers – a material chemically related to plastic and derived from crude oil. The vast majority is used in the healthcare sector, and most are discarded after single use. This creates a massive amount of material waste globally. However, Simon Kildahl, a postdoc at the Department of Chemistry at Aarhus University, has moved a step closer to a way of recycling these gloves.
In a new study published in the scientific journal Chem, he and his colleagues demonstrate how they can transform waste rubber into a CO₂ adsorbent in the laboratory. The potential, he explains, is significant.
“A plastic bottle can be recycled relatively easily, as we know from deposit-return systems. But other plastic materials are problematic because they cannot be reused in the same way. Therefore, they often end up being burned, which is currently the case for rubber gloves,” he says.
“In our experiments, we converted the glove so that it can capture CO₂ instead of becoming a waste product that releases CO₂ and other harmful gases during incineration.”
Major breakthroughs
Simon Kildahl is part of the Skydstrup Group under the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO₂ Research Center (CORC). Headquartered at Aarhus University, the center is a global collaboration of universities researching ways to capture CO₂ or convert it into products like fuel via Power-to-X.
The group has previously succeeded in recycling materials such as polyurethane foam from mattresses, as well as epoxy and glass fibers from wind turbine blades – materials that were previously considered impossible to recycle. Now, it appears they have succeeded with rubber gloves as well.
“Specifically, we shred the rubber glove into small pieces. It then reacts with a ruthenium-based catalyst and hydrogen gas, after which it can capture CO₂ from simulated flue gas,” Kildahl explains. “In the real world, this could potentially take place at a power plant.”
When heated, the rubber product regenerated and then the CO₂ again, allowing the gas to be sent for underground storage or used in Power-to-X. Simultaneously, the material is refreshed and ready to capture new CO₂.
Revolutionary perspectives
The method is brand new. While materials for CO₂ capture already exist, Kildahl’s approach stands out by using waste material that would otherwise be burned or landfilled.
The experiments bring us a step closer to a more climate-friendly alternative that aligns with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) goal of removing 5–16 billion tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere annually by 2050.
To reach these goals, CO₂ must be captured from biomass incineration plants or directly from the air. The problem is that current methods require a scale-up of oil-based production, which inherently reduces the overall climate benefit.
“That is why it is smart to utilize a waste material available in such large quantities, rather than extracting more oil from the ground,” Kildahl points out. “With the rubber glove, we can create a CO2 capture material where almost every atom in the product comes from waste, except for a small amount of hydrogen, which can ideally be obtained from water via Power-to-X.”
Promising results
Currently, the experiments are at the laboratory stage. The goal is to make the process scalable and economically viable – a goal Kildahl believes is well within reach.
On a scale from early idea (TRL 1) to fully implemented commercial technology (TRL 9), the research is currently at a level 3 or 4.
“We are working on a gram scale right now, and reactions can look and behave differently when we scale up to kilograms. But our results look very promising,” he says.
The process also needs to become cheaper to produce, as the catalyst currently used is expensive.
“However, we have reached a ‘proof of concept.’ It is entirely possible that we can reach level 5 or 6 in the near future if we can improve the scalability and the economy of the reaction, as well as enhance certain performance parameters for CO₂ capture with these materials,” Kildahl concludes.
Journal Reference:
Kildahl, Simon Stampe et al., ‘CO₂ capture with post-modified nitrile and styrene-butadiene-styrene rubbers’, Chem online ed., 0: 102918 (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2025.102918. Also available on ScienceDirect.
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Aarhus University
— Press Release —
GPS data reveals: Feral horses and cattle create more resilient nature
Protected natural areas across Europe are changing. Climate change, with rising temperatures and heavy rainfall, is turbocharging the growth of shrubs and trees, choking the flowers and insects that need the light and heat of open spaces.
Traditionally, this scenario prompts nature managers to reach for chainsaws and brush cutters to keep the landscape open.
But researchers at Aarhus University and the Natural History Museum Aarhus, Denmark, can now show that horses and cattle represent a more effective method of nature management given adequate time to do their work.
The method is called ‘trophic rewilding’, and at the Mols Laboratory field station in Eastern Jutland researchers followed herds of up to 70 feral horses and cattle from 2017 to 2022. The animals live the autonomous lives of wild animals without supplementary feeding year-round, allowing researchers to gain a deeper understanding of how they use the area.
The five-year study, published in the scientific journal Ecological Applications, shows that the animals use all parts of the landscape, but with a general preference for open grassland areas over closed woodland.
Jeppe Aagaard Kristensen, assistant professor at the Department of Biology and lead author of the study, explains: “Where traditional nature management often tries to freeze the landscape in a particular state, the animals at Mols make their own decisions and we see that they do not spread their efforts evenly. This means we cannot expect uniform development across the landscape. It is precisely this natural dynamic that shapes a varied landscape and forms the foundation of a healthy ecosystem.”
Animals shape the landscape
In the new study, the researchers combine, for the first time, the massive amounts of GPS data from cattle and horses from this area with time series of vegetation data captured from satellites (NDVI). By analysing how the animals use the landscape over several years, the researchers can now understand with great confidence how the animals’ preferences directly affect vegetation development and ecosystem resilience.
“When the animals favour certain open grassland areas, their presence has a direct effect: biomass is kept down in those areas, while trees and shrubs can more freely grow and spread in areas the animals visit less often. You should therefore not expect a uniform outcome from a rewilding project, but rather a nature shaped by the animals’ active and dynamic choices in the landscape,” explains Kristensen.
Horses and cattle make a good mix
Although horses and cattle are often regarded as similar, the GPS data shows they are different specialists.
In summer they agree on the best pastures, but during periods of resource scarcity, they move toward different areas and food sources. This diversity is valuable for biodiversity, as it ensures a more varied impact on vegetation than if only one species of large herbivore were present.
Jens-Christian Svenning, professor in biology and co-author of the study, explains that we may fool ourselves by perceiving horses and cattle as one homogeneous group of ‘large grazers’.
“Their different use of the landscape during periods of resource scarcity aligns well with DNA studies of their food choices, and this functional variation can help create more dynamic and varied landscapes with greater biodiversity value,” says Svenning.
Animals build drought resilience
The study also examined the effects of the extreme pan-European drought of 2018. It found that the areas used most intensively by the animals were most sensitive to drought, but also the fastest to turn green again afterwards. This ability to ‘bounce back’ is called resilience, says Jeppe Aagaard Kristensen.
“As the climate becomes more extreme, the role of the animals becomes even more important. They create a dynamic that passive nature management – simple land abandonment – cannot match. By keeping small patches completely open while allowing others to grow, the animals create a patchwork of habitats with varying resilience to the extreme weather events that will occur more frequently in a warmer future.”
A subsequent reduction of the herbivore population by around two thirds led to a general greening of the landscape, with no clear relationship to previous space-use intensity – underlining that the animals’ positive effect depends on their continued presence.
A shelter as an unintended magnet
The most surprising finding in the study was the animals’ attraction to man-made infrastructure. A wooden shelter in the area acted as a magnet, particularly for the horses. This insight is crucial for future nature projects, says Kristensen: “It prompts careful consideration of how we design these areas, so we do not inadvertently end up controlling the development of nature. Our results show that the placement of a shelter or a water trough can unintentionally dictate where the animals spend most of their time. By moving infrastructure, you can control which parts of the landscape the animals keep open, rather than letting the animals’ natural preferences guide them.”
Senior researcher Kent Olsen, who leads the rewilding project at the Mols Laboratory and is a co-author of the study, adds that while water troughs are a necessity in areas without natural water sources, shelters are not a biological necessity for the animals’ survival, even if they choose to use them:
“The animals at the Mols Laboratory belong to species that can handle most weather conditions. They find natural shelter under tree canopies and in hollows in the terrain. While our study indicate that they seek out shelters when the opportunity arises, it is important to emphasise that this is not a sign of distress, but a behaviour we need to take into account, so we do not alter their natural movement by erecting unnecessary infrastructure.”
Welfare is a top priority
Although the goal of rewilding is to let nature take its course, this does not mean the animals are left entirely to their own devices, underlines Olsen.
A central part of the experiment at the Mols Laboratory is precisely to combine wild behaviour with high animal welfare. Each individual animal is monitored daily, and if an animal is assessed as unlikely to survive the winter naturally, it is removed from the herd.
“It is important to understand that we aim to recreate natural dynamics in which the animal population fluctuates according to the landscape’s resources. But this happens under controlled conditions, where there are never more animals on the land than the food base can support,” explains Olsen.
Journal Reference:
Kristensen, Jeppe Å., Robert Buitenwerf, Emilio Berti, Oskar L. P. Hansen, Simon D. Schowanek, Rasmus Ejrnæs, Morten D. D. Hansen, Kent Olsen, Signe Normand, and Jens-Christian Svenning, ‘Space-Use by Feral Cattle and Horses Shapes Vegetation Structure in a Trophic Rewilding Area’, Ecological Applications 36, (1): e70170 (2026). DOI: 10.1002/eap.70170
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Henriette Stevnhøj | Aarhus University
— Press Release —
Improved EV battery technology will outmatch degradation from climate change
Climate change was poised to create an interesting catch-22 for electric vehicles. Electrifying transportation can go a long way to reducing carbon emissions that are driving up global temperatures. But warmer temperatures also accelerate the degradation of batteries, whose performance can be a make-or-break factor for people considering an EV purchase.
In a new study led by the University of Michigan, however, researchers have shown that batteries have gotten a lot better over the past several years. So much so, in fact, that their gains will more than offset their expected heat-related degradation on a warming planet. The research was supported by federal funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
“Thanks to technological improvements, consumers should have more confidence in their EV batteries, even in a warmer future,” said Haochi Wu, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Wu performed the work as a visiting doctoral student at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS.
The team’s study combined EV simulations with models of battery degradation and climate change to compare the endurance of old batteries made between 2010 and 2018 with new batteries made between 2019 and 2023. In a scenario where the planet warms by 2 degrees Celsius, old batteries would see their lifetimes drop by an average of 8% up to a maximum of 30%. For new batteries, the average lifetime drop is just 3% and the maximum is only 10%.
“I think these improvements are well-known to experts in the field. But, when I started this project, I was looking at web forums and reading how people were deciding on cars,” Wu said. “There are still a lot of durability concerns about EV batteries.”
Those concerns were driven, in part, by a rash of incidents about a decade ago where EV drivers in warmer climates saw their battery capacities evaporate, Wu said. But those should be problems of the past, according to the team’s analysis.
Hot takes
The researchers looked at battery lifetimes across 300 cities around the world in a variety of warming scenarios and found that the improvements held up globally. In fact, the warmest cities, like those nearest the equator, actually stand to see the biggest gains.
The team’s methodology also stood out to experts in the field, as well as to editors at the journal that published the work. Their framework coupled climate projections with experimentally calibrated models of battery degradation and simulations of EV driving behavior to create high-fidelity battery profiles at granular temporal scales, Wu said.
“The authors find an interesting way to model the important role of technological advance in mitigating the negative effect of climate change,” wrote the editorial team at Nature Climate Change. The journal also invited Wu and Craig to submit a research briefing about their work, making it more visible and accessible to the research community.
There are some important caveats associated with the study’s results, however, pointed out senior author, Michael Craig, associate professor at SEAS and the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, or IOE. Importantly, the team used two representative EVs for their work, the Tesla Model 3 and the Volkswagen ID.3.
“In regions like Europe and the United States, we feel like we’ve got a good handle on the battery technology that’s available in those regions,” Craig said. “But when we’re looking at cities in India or sub-Saharan Africa, for example, they may have very different vehicle fleets – and they almost certainly do. So our results may be optimistic for those regions.”
In these regions, the impacts of warming are also going to be worse and felt more acutely, which highlights another dimension of how inequalities are exacerbated by climate change. This theme also came through in another recent study from Craig and Wu.
Road maps to resilience
Published in the journal Joule, the researchers’ related project was inspired by a similar question about how global warming would impact rooftop solar cell performance. In particular, they examined where climate change would push solar panels into high-temperature risks and extreme high-temperature risks, which are technical thresholds defined by the International Electrochemical Commission, or IEC. These high-temperature risks can accelerate the degradation of conventional solar panels, which can reduce their reliability and prompt sooner-than-expected replacement.
They found that, under the current IEC standards, those risks are underestimated for more than half of our existing and future rooftop photovoltaic installation capacity. Again, these risks will be most acute where warming will be the greatest, which are often low- and middle-income areas.
“On the solar side, we’re saying we know the risk is coming, so we need to prepare for it and update our standards. But if you update the standards, there’s a whole menu of options available to panel developers, manufacturers and installers that can deal with that risk,” Craig said. “Just like EV technology is mitigating that risk, we can mitigate the risk in solar. We just need to have some foresight.”
Although that by itself doesn’t solve the issues of inequity, it does mean that groups looking for answers can focus on how the technology is deployed rather than whether it exists.
“More vulnerable regions are going to suffer a larger negative impact from climate change, but we’re finding technological improvements can mitigate that,” Wu said. “That is good news.”
Parth Vaishnav and Jiahui Chen of U-M also contributed to the Nature Climate Change study. Qinqin Kong and Matthew Huber of Purdue University were co-authors of the Joule report. Mingyan Sun of Peking University was a collaborator on both projects.
Funding for the Joule study came from the NSF, NSFC, NASA and the Smart Grid-National Science and Technology Major Project. Both studies were supported by Advanced Research Computing at U-M.
Journal Reference:
Wu, H., Chen, J., Vaishnav, P. et al., ‘Technological improvements in EV batteries offset climate-induced durability challenges’, Nature Climate Change (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02579-z
Wu, Haochi et al., ‘Climate change will increase high-temperature risks, degradation, and costs of rooftop photovoltaics globally’, Joule 10, (1): 102218 (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2025.102218. Also available on ScienceDirect.
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Matt Davenport | University of Michigan (U-M)
— Press Release —
Modern twist on wildfire management methods found also to have a bonus feature that protects water supplies
Wildfires are among the most economically costly natural disasters and becoming more severe and frequent due to global warming. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates that global damage from wildfires was on average $106 billion per year between 2014 and 2023. The US is especially prone: the 10 most costly wildfires since 1970 all happened there, with the 2025 wildfires around Los Angeles topping the charts at $53 billion. Worldwide, wildfires destroyed 3.9 million sq km in 2025.
One way to limit the risk and severity of wildfires is forest thinning, where foresters shred and mulch small trees, shrubs, and dense understory brush, create gaps between tree crowns, and remove those species least resistant to fire. This can simultaneously promote biodiversity by admitting light into the understory and increase habitat complexity.
But now, researchers in the US have shown with observational data in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change that the benefits of forest thinning don’t end there.
“Here we show that forest treatments used to reduce wildfire risk also help recover snow storage that has been diminished by forest change and a warming climate, with stronger effects on north-facing slopes than on south-facing slopes,” said corresponding author Dr Cassie Lumbrazo, a research scientist at the University of Washington and the University of Alaska Southeast.
“These treatments recovered about 12.3 acre-feet of snow-stored water per 100 acres on north-facing slopes, equivalent to roughly 15 Olympic swimming pools per square kilometer, compared to about 5.1 acre-feet per 100 acres, or about six swimming pools per square kilometer, on south-facing slopes.”
Snowball effect
The researchers studied the effect of forest thinning on Cle Elum Ridge in the state of Washington. The area is a regional hotspot for wildfire risk reduction actions, as well as at high risk of drought. It is typical of mid- to high-elevation forests spanning the dry eastern flanks of the Cascade Mountain range in Washington and Oregon, as well as parts of the Blue Mountains in northeastern Oregon and northeastern Washington’s Colville National Forest. In Washington, wildfires are most common between July and October, as moisture from winter and spring precipitation dries up.
But this protective snowpack has declined over the last century due to global warming, and is projected to decrease by a further 50% by the end of the century. This is worrisome, because seasonal snow yields between 53 and 78% of the water for human use in the region.
Between 2021 and 2023, Lumbrazo and colleagues used LIDAR and time-lapse photography to study the evolution of the snowpack in 12 plots of 100 sq meter located on either the north or south side of the Cle Elum Ridge. Each plot was located within a forest unit – between 809 and 40,469 sq meter in area – which was experimentally thinned to a different density and arrangement of trees. Using modern tools, the thinning method was inspired by ancient fire-adapted forests, which were shaped via indigenous burning and wildfire.
The techniques used in this study were developed in consultation with the Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative, a group of decision-makers from the Yakama Nation, the Nature Conservancy, the Okanogan Wenatchee Forest Service, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Four additional plots remained untreated and served as comparison.
The results showed that thinning led to a deeper snowpack in winter: the depth and storage of snow increased by 30% on north-facing slopes and 16% on south-facing slopes. The amount of recovered water increased with increasing openness of the canopy and the number of small to mid-sized gaps (4 meters to 16 meters across) at ground level, but was not associated with traditional forestry measures such as the joint area taken up by tree trunks at breast height.
Theory holds water
The authors concluded that managing a forest to improve its resistance to wildfire also promotes ‘hydrological resilience’ – its ability to deliver a sustainable supply of clean water for nature and people in the face of changes in the climate and human activity.
But why was the effect so much stronger on north-facing slopes?
“On north-facing slopes in this part of the Eastern Cascades, forest structure strongly controls how much snow reaches the ground, because tree canopies intercept snowfall, and small gaps allow more snow to accumulate where sunlight is limited,” observed Lumbrazo.
“On south-facing slopes, where snowpacks are shallower and receive more sunlight, solar radiation and ground vegetation seem to play a larger role in how quickly snow melts.”
The authors counsel that recommendations for forest thinning, which typically focus on the more wildfire-prone southern slopes, should give equal attention to northern slopes to maximize the snowpack.
“Our research shows that ecological forest management can recover some of the water lost due to overstocked forests and climate change, thus helping to support aquatic ecosystems that are dependent upon snowpack,” said Dr Emily Howe, the study’s second author and an ecologist at the Nature Conservancy of Washington in Seattle.
Journal Reference:
Lumbrazo C, Howe ER, Dickerson-Lange SE, Pestana S, Cramblitt J, Dedinsky K, Smith K and Lundquist JD, ‘Can we maximize snow storage through fire-resilient forest treatments? Insights from experimental forest treatments in the Eastern Cascades, WA, USA’, Frontiers in Forests and Global Change 8: 1707812 (2026). DOI: 10.3389/ffgc.2025.1707812
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Frontiers
Featured image credit: Freepik (AI Gen.)
