The tiny insects are older than dinosaurs. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Not eating yellow snow is obviously wise advice, but how about snow that looks like a poppy seed bagel? You should also avoid that too, because those "seeds" may actually be tiny critters commonly called snow fleas. As a video taken at the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge in Massachusetts shows, these little black specks bounce across the snow.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. At the US Army Corps of Engineers' research facility in central Alaska, a unique tunnel descends underground. They were hunting for something much smaller--and smellier. "The first thing you notice when you walk in there is that it smells really bad. It smells like a musty basement that's been left to sit for way too long," geological scientist Tristan Caro recounted in a statement .

Mitigating climate change requires transforming agriculture to minimize environ mental impact and build climate resilience. Regenerative agricultural practices enhance soil organic carbon (SOC) levels, thus improving soil health and sequestering carbon. A challenge to increasing regenerative agriculture practices is cheaply measuring SOC over time and understanding how SOC is affected by regenerative agricultural practices and other environmental factors and farm management practices. To address this challenge, we introduce an AI-driven Soil Organic Carbon Copilot that automates the ingestion of complex multi-resolution, multi-modal data to provide large-scale insights into soil health and regenerative practices. Our data includes extreme weather event data (e.g., drought and wildfire incidents), farm management data (e.g., cropland information and tillage predictions), and SOC predictions. We find that integrating public data and specialized models enables large-scale, localized analysis for sustainable agriculture. In comparisons of agricultural practices across California counties, we find evidence that diverse agricultural activity may mitigate the negative effects of tillage; and that while extreme weather conditions heavily affect SOC, composting may mitigate SOC loss. Finally, implementing role-specific personas empowers agronomists, farm consultants, policymakers, and other stakeholders to implement evidence-based strategies that promote sustainable agriculture and build climate resilience.

Monitoring organic matter is pivotal for maintaining soil health and can help inform sustainable soil management practices. While sensor-based soil information offers higher-fidelity and reliable insights into organic matter changes, sampling and measuring sensor data is cost-prohibitive. We propose a multi-modal, scalable framework that can estimate organic matter from remote sensing data, a more readily available data source while leveraging sparse soil information for improving generalization. Using the sensor data, we preserve underlying causal relations among sensor attributes and organic matter. Simultaneously we leverage inherent structure in the data and train the model to discriminate among domains using contrastive learning. This causal and contrastive constraint minimization ensures improved generalization and adaptation to other domains. We also shed light on the interpretability of the framework by identifying attributes that are important for improving generalization. Identifying these key soil attributes that affect organic matter will aid in efforts to standardize data collection efforts.

The Perseverance Rover has found evidence of organic compounds in the Jezero Crater on Mars. Don't get too excited: These compounds could have also developed in nonbiological ways. But even if it's not proof of organic life on Mars, the results hint at complex organic conditions for the "key building blocks for life." Organic molecules like those observed in the Jezero Crater contain carbon and often hydrogen atoms. They're the core components of life as we know it on Earth.

AN ultrarealistic AI robot has opinions about the afterlife and can even sense anxiety with her advanced technology, The U.S. Sun has learned. Through a camera in her eyes, the amazing bot called "Xoxe" (pronounced Zo-zie) can detect if anybody in her presence has committed any illegal activities. Her creator, Dr. Sam Khoze of AI LIFE, a plastic surgeon who pivoted into holding an AI doctorate, crafted her character from that of a social media influencer. "We train her based on social media communications between humans," he told The U.S Sun at Nevada's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Despite his modest Instagram following, Dr. Khoze "gets like 8,000 views" when he shows off Xoxe, who often pops up on his page.

Depending on the robot's work, sustainability could look different from machine to machine. In general, making a more sustainable robot starts with ethically sourced recycled or sustainable materials, functioning as energy efficiently as possible. Then the robot has to be repairable if broken and recyclable when it's time to retire. While some sensors or computer chips might not currently be recyclable or reusable, those pieces wouldn't make up a large percentage of the machine. Some definitions of sustainability include the robot's function.

It is thought that the ocean's biological carbon pump, the process that transfers organic matter from the surface to the deep ocean, should be sensitive to climate change because temperature controls photosynthesis and respiration rates. Boscolo-Galazzo et al. show that the efficiency of the biological carbon pump increased over the past 15 million years as the oceans cooled because of a reduction in the rate of the breakdown of sinking organic matter (see the Perspective by Bopp). The resulting redistribution of nutrients at depth could have affected plankton evolution and expanded the mesopelagic “twilight zone” ecosystem. Science , this issue p. [1148][1]; see also p. [1099][2] Theory suggests that the ocean’s biological carbon pump, the process by which organic matter is produced at the surface and transferred to the deep ocean, is sensitive to temperature because temperature controls photosynthesis and respiration rates. We applied a combined data-modeling approach to investigate carbon and nutrient recycling rates across the world ocean over the past 15 million years of global cooling. We found that the efficiency of the biological carbon pump increased with ocean cooling as the result of a temperature-dependent reduction in the rate of remineralization (degradation) of sinking organic matter. Increased food delivery at depth prompted the development of new deep-water niches, triggering deep plankton evolution and the expansion of the mesopelagic “twilight zone” ecosystem. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.abb6643 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.abg5994

Nasa's Perseverance rover, due to launch to Mars this summer, will search an ancient crater lake for signs of past life. But if biology ever emerged on the Red Planet, how will scientists recognise it? Here, mission scientist Ken Williford explains what they're looking for. Today, Mars is hostile to life. It's too cold for water to stay liquid on the surface, and the thin atmosphere lets through high levels of radiation, potentially sterilising the upper part of the soil. Some 3.5 billion years ago or more, water with a near-neutral pH was present on the surface.