Explore the latest insights from top science journals in the Muser Press daily roundup (September 16, 2025), featuring impactful research on climate change challenges.
In brief:
When does melting ice capsize? New research unearths several mechanisms
Rising temperatures of the world’s oceans threaten to accelerate the melting and splintering of glaciers – thereby potentially increasing the number of icebergs and, with it, the need to better understand more about their movement and impact. Through a series of experiments, a team of scientists has pinpointed some of the factors that cause icebergs to capsize, offering insights into how climate change may affect Earth’s waters.
“Our study contributes fundamental knowledge about ice physics, which is a vital factor in the health of our planet and which needs to be understood to improve climate modeling and weather forecasting,” explains Leif Ristroph, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Physical Review Fluids. “These results show how iceberg melting and capsizing are related in complicated ways. This information is crucial as ice melting can be considered the ‘canary in the coalmine’: the earliest warning of when the Earth is warming or otherwise out of its usual balance.”
The researchers, who also included NYU’s Bobae Johnson, Zihan Zhang, and Alison Kim as well as the Flatiron Institute’s Scott Weady, conducted a series of experiments in the university’s Applied Mathematics Laboratory that replicated floating icebergs.
To do so, they prepared ice blocks in the form of long cylinders – eliminating bubbles that would complicate the conditions – and placed them in a tank of room-temperature fresh water, which has proven to be an effective medium to gauge ice melt in past studies. The scientists then used cameras to capture the speed and movement of the model iceberg’s melting and capsizing.
“We found that melting gradually reshapes the ice, which then abruptly rotates or capsizes before settling into a new orientation,” explains Ristroph. “This process repeats over and over. We typically see about 10 to 15 capsize events during the 30 minutes it takes the ice to completely melt away.”
During this process, the shape of the ice changes significantly, developing edges and corners to eventually resemble a pentagon – an unexpected outcome. The transformation is captured in this video of the experiments.
“This came as a total surprise, so we worked to explain the observations by developing a mathematical model that could account for how melting changes the shape of ice and how the evolving new shape can induce the ice to capsize,” says Ristroph.
The mathematical model, developed by drawing from the experimental data, included the effects of the weight and buoyancy forces on the ice as well as the hydrodynamic forces due to its motion in the water – and illuminated the various factors driving shape change and capsizing.
“We learned that melting primarily happens along the wetted surface of the ice below the waterline while the ‘tip’ out of the water is almost unaffected, which eventually leaves the ice top heavy so that it loses gravitational stability in the water and rotates over,” recounts Ristroph. “Surprisingly, it tends to rotate through a special angle corresponding to one-fifth of a complete revolution – and this relates to why the shape eventually has five sides.”
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The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DMS-2206573).
Journal Reference:
Johnson Bobae, Weady Scott, Zhang Zihan, Kim Alison, and Ristroph Leif, ‘Shape evolution and capsize dynamics of melting ice’, Physical Review Fluids 10, 093801 (2025). DOI: 10.1103/rc7r-h66q
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by James Devitt | New York University (NYU)
Ancient crop discovered in the Canary Islands thanks to archaeological DNA
Over a thousand years ago, the Indigenous people of the island of Gran Canaria used long-term storage to preserve their harvest. They dug out grain silos directly from the volcanic bedrock in places that were very difficult to access. And there, some of the seeds remained. The conditions were so good that DNA was preserved in the plant parts into the present day.
Today, these millennial crops are a goldmine for scientists.
In the current study, the researchers analysed lentils found in these grain silos. By comparing DNA from the archaeological lentils with those currently grown in the Canary Islands, Spain and Morocco, they were able to trace how the lentils, and their cultivation, have evolved over time. The study is one of the first to use archaeological DNA from legumes.
European seafarers discovered the Canary Islands outside Africa in the 1300s. At that time, the islands were inhabited by people who had arrived from North Africa more than a thousand years earlier. There are some written sources where Europeans describe farming by the Indigenous people at the time – but there is no mention of lentils. So, when did the lentils come to the Canary Islands, and how?
The new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, shows that lentils have a long history in the islands. Genetic analyses carried out by the researchers showed that many of the lentils grown on the islands today actually originate from lentils that the Indigenous people had brought with them from North Africa in the 200s.
“The same type of lentils has been cultivated for almost 2,000 years in the Canary Islands. This is interesting, especially considering that the Indigenous population was greatly diminished when Europeans took over the islands. But the new settlers seem to have adopted the Indigenous people’s crops and continued to grow them,” says Jenny Hagenblad, senior associate professor at Linköping University, who led the study.
How is it that the lentils survived that long? The researchers’ theory is that these varieties were well adapted to the local climate. Another idea is that Indigenous women, who married immigrating men, played an important role in preserving the knowledge of which crops to grow. To this day, Canarian women have more knowledge than men about the plants grown for food.
That the Canary Islands have preserved their original type of lentils for so long is not just a fun fact. Interest in the cultural heritage of the islands is growing and many want to cook and eat food rooted in their history. The lentils turn out to be part of that story.
“We also see in our study that different types of lentils are grown on different islands – even islands where it was previously thought that lentils were never cultivated. It’s important to preserve lentils from different islands, because genetic diversity can prove valuable for the future of agriculture,” says Jonathan Santana, researcher at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
The researchers also made another discovery. Lenteja tipo Lanzarote, or Lanzarote lentil, is a common term for lentils in Spanish shops. These lentils are not produced on the island of Lanzarote, but the designation is associated with quality. When the researchers compared lentils currently grown on the Spanish mainland with contemporary Canarian lentils, DNA analyses showed that lentils from Lanzarote appear to have been cross-bred with the Spanish lentils.
“Our results indicate that the lentils from Lanzarote have contributed not only their name but also their genes to Spanish lentils. With the climate change that is now taking place, Canarian lentils, adapted to growing in dry and warm conditions, may be of great interest for future plant breeding,” says Jacob Morales, associate professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
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The study was funded with the support of, among others, the European Research Council (ERC) and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Data analyses were carried out using the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputers in Sweden (NAISS), which is partly funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Journal Reference:
Jenny Hagenblad, Jacob Morales, Rosa Fregel, Pedro Henríquez-Valido, Matti W. Leino, Amelia C. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Jonathan Santana, ‘Ancient DNA from lentils (Lens culinaris) illuminates human – plant – culture interactions in the Canary Islands’, Journal of Archaeological Science 183, 106360 (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2025.106360
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Karin Söderlund Leifler | Linköping University (LiU)
Architecture’s past holds the key to sustainable future
Modern ‘sustainable’ innovations in architecture are failing to slow climate change, but revisiting ancient knowledge and techniques found in traditional architecture could offer better solutions.
This is the argument of architectural historians Professor Florian Urban and Barnabas Calder in their new book ‘Form Follows Fuel: 14 Buildings from Antiquity to the Oil Age’. The authors argue that energy availability has been the biggest influence in architecture throughout human history.
Their extensive study is the first to calculate energy inputs for a range of historical buildings, demonstrating how different types of fuel, from human labour to fossil fuels, have fundamentally determined building designs across civilisations and eras.
“The history of architecture can be told as a history of energy,” the authors explain. “Today’s architecture is accordingly the outcome of four centuries of effort, innovation and ingenuity directed at maximising the proportion of architectural production and operation that could be powered by fossil fuel heat.”
This argument comes at a critical moment in architectural history, as the building sector currently accounts for 37% of all human climate-changing emissions. Despite decades of research and discussion, the environmental impact of buildings continues to rise.
Urban and Calder document how the shift to fossil fuels begins in the 17th century and transforms architecture more profoundly than any other development in human history. This transition reversed the previous dynamic, where labour was cheap and heat expensive, creating an architectural model which depended on energy-intensive materials and processes that reduced human input.
“If form follows fuel, ours is fundamentally an architecture of intense fossil fuel consumption,” the authors explain.
Even as society becomes more aware of emissions and carbon footprint, and more efforts are made to build sustainably, the authors prove that today’s architecture comes at a catastrophically high energy cost.
They explain how globally influential minimalist designs often depend on massive energy consumption, for example, the Seagram Building in New York, widely praised for its simplicity, received an energy efficiency rating of just 3 out of 100 from the US Environmental Protection Agency, and cost more energy to build than the entire labour cost of quarrying, transporting and placing 5.5m tonnes of stone for the largest of the Egyptian pyramids.
“Mies’s famous dictum that ‘less is more,’ turns out to be missing a word: ‘less is more carbon,’” the authors explain. “Per square meter of floor space, it used four times as much energy as the average American office building in 2012.”
By contrast, pre-modern buildings like the Scottish blackhouse achieved remarkable thermal efficiency using only local materials and passive design strategies. Examples of buildings like these show how humans have always before been able to provide the interior space and thermal comfort needed for survival in a harsh climate, while being fully sustainable and recyclable.
The authors’ studies span 4,500 years of architectural history, from the Great Pyramid of Giza to Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
The authors offer practical solutions for contemporary architects by unpicking the specific energy costs of different building elements and materials. For instance, their research demonstrates how structural stone tenements used significantly less energy throughout their life cycle than similar brick buildings, providing quantifiable metrics to inform modern sustainable design decisions.
Professor Urban says: “With regard to energy consumption, the world has never had so many pharaohs. Not only special buildings like the Seagram, but even our most mundane buildings use more energy than the most extraordinary structures of the ancient world.”
As architects and policymakers search for solutions to the climate emergency, ‘Form Follows Fuel‘ challenges assumptions about sustainability always meaning technological advancement, and provides an alternative approach to low-carbon architecture.
“The historic conditions of life without fossil fuels often look like poverty to those living in today’s energy-rich societies,” the authors explain, “but whilst luxuries were sparse and ill-distributed, materials local, and technologies comparatively simple for most non-fossil-fuel buildings, they had one immense advantage at a global scale: they collectively used resources at a rate within the bounds of what the planetary ecosystem could sustain.”
Book
Urban, F., & Calder, B., ‘Form Follows Fuel: 14 Buildings from Antiquity to the Oil Age (1st ed.)’, Routledge (2025). DOI: 10.4324/9781032637174
Article Source:
Press Release/Material by Taylor & Francis Group
Featured image credit: Gerd Altmann | Pixabay
