Imagine a future in which every home has an appliance that pulls all the water the household needs out of the air, even in dry or desert climates, using only the power of the sun.

That future may be around the corner, with the demonstration this week of a water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight to pull liters of water out of the air each day in conditions as low as 20 percent humidity, a level common in arid areas.

A new reconfigurable device that emits patterns of thermal infrared light in a fully controllable manner could one day make it possible to collect waste heat at infrared wavelengths and turn it into usable energy.

What is the volume of water in lakes on Earth? Using a mathematical analysis, researcher David Seekell, at Umeå University, and his American collaborators now suggest that the mean depth of lakes is 30 per cent lower than previously estimated. Shallower lakes implies less fresh water and has consequences for our understanding of climate change and the carbon cycle. The results have been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

In order to have a good chance of meeting the limits set by the Paris Agreement, it will be necessary to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions while preserving carbon sinks,  with net emissions peaking in the next ten years, according to a new study.

Research in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys indicates that microbes are a source of organic material.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has rapidly increased. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire set out to determine how rising carbon dioxide concentrations and different climates may alter vegetation like forests, croplands, and 40 million acres of American lawns. They found that the clues may lie in an unexpected source, mushrooms.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have revealed extraordinary details about a recently discovered far-flung member of our solar system, the planetary body 2014 UZ224, more informally known as DeeDee.

An analysis of 35 popular phone-based sleep apps finds that while most help users set sleep-related goals and track and manage their sleep, few make use of other methods known to help the chronically sleep-deprived.

New research on solar storms finds that they not only can cause regions of excessive electrical charge in the upper atmosphere above Earth's poles, they also can do the exact opposite: cause regions that are nearly depleted of electrically charged particles. The finding adds to our knowledge of how solar storms affect Earth and could possibly lead to improved radio communication and navigation systems for the Arctic. 

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have invented a new catalyst that can efficiently convert carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO). This soon-to-be patented invention enables the sustainable utilisation of CO2, a potent greenhouse gas linked to climate change. If successful on a larger scale, this invention could provide a practical way to convert CO2 to useful chemicals.

The researchers behind the catalyst, UvA chemists Edwin Gnanakumar and Shiju Raveendran, are in the process of commercialising the catalyst with the help of Amsterdam Innovation Exchange (IXA), the university’s technology transfer office.