It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Studying bird flu in the air to protect people, agricultural operations in Michigan and beyond
Understanding the virus that causes bird flu in livestock, and how to kill it, could help industrial farms prevent transmission
A $2M USDA grant will fund research on the infectivity of bird flu in the air.
Nonthermal plasma has been shown to deactivate airborne virus particles.
University of Michigan Engineering is collaborating with researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
Discovering how the bird flu virus degrades in the air around livestock and how engineering solutions can effect that degradation quickly and efficiently are core aims of a new University of Michigan Engineering-led project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This work could help prevent or mitigate future outbreaks.
Detection of bird flu infection within flocks and herds leads to the mass culling of animals, which disrupts food supply chains. The ongoing outbreak of HPAI H5N1 that began in 2022 in the U.S. has led to the loss of 175 million birds and, as of late 2024, has cost the industry roughly $1.4 billion.
How quickly does the virus that causes bird flu lose its infectivity in the air, specifically air found in enclosed livestock environments?
What technologies can effectively reduce bird flu's infectivity in those environments?
Herek Clack, U-M associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, will lead the project, conducting tests on how nonthermal plasmas can render aerosols containing the virus that causes bird flu incapable of infecting humans and livestock. His team's approach essentially exposes air to strong electric fields, temporarily creating free electrical charges that damage viruses and render them harmless.
"Both the USDA and the agricultural industry want a playbook—science-based guidelines—for how to operate under the threat of bird flu," Clack said. "We're after a better understanding of how the airborne virus behaves in enclosed livestock operations and what technologies can best protect animals and workers."
How nonthermal plasma inactivates viruses
Previously, Clack and his team developed a plasma reactor capable of reducing the number of infectious viruses in the air by 99.9%. Building on that work, they will test how nonthermal plasma inactivates viruses in air that contains traces of pollutants, such as ammonia, that are common around livestock.
Clack and his team have previously shown that such air pollutants can, at very low concentrations, inhibit the effectiveness of nonthermal plasmas for inactivating viral aerosols. Under this new grant, they will expand the range of air pollutants tested and explore enhancements to the nonthermal plasma that could counteract those pollutants' effects. Of particular interest is how air pollutants and plasma treatment separately influence the air's pH, a chemical measure related to acidity.
"A key question we're looking at is, 'What will happen with pH levels—how do they impact the infectivity of the viruses?'" Clack said. "The air pollutants tend to raise the pH in the air, but nonthermal plasma reduces pH."
If part of the plasma's effectiveness depends on lowering the pH of the air, it may not be as effective if the air's pH starts higher.
Measuring normal bird flu virus infectivity loss in air
Allen Haddrell, a research fellow at the University of Bristol in the U.K., will employ a relatively new technology of his own design to answer the question of how long the virus that causes bird flu retains its infectivity in the air. The traditional method for measuring how quickly airborne viruses decay involves filling a cylindrical drum with virus-laden air, then slowly rotating the drum to keep the virus particles in the air. But setup for this method is slow.
"What they miss with that approach is roughly the first 20 minutes of the infectivity decay," Haddrell said. "Consequently, they can get wildly different results. Different research groups can look at the same virus and come to different conclusions."
"We levitate virus-containing droplets into an electrodynamic field," he said. "We expose the population of viruses containing aerosols to different environmental conditions, where we change things like relative humidity or gas composition.
"After a set period, we deposit the aerosol and measure how much the viral infectivity has changed. We use this approach to measure how different environments affect airborne viral decay. And we use this information to figure out the fundamental drivers of decay."
A better grasp of the decay dynamics associated with the virus that causes bird flu and a proven means of inactivating the virus in ventilation air would give the agricultural industry tools to better deal with the virus's next appearance. But it will also lay the groundwork for an industry response to the next human pandemic.
"During COVID, workers in these enclosed livestock or processing operations were 50 to 70 times more at risk for contracting the virus, according to a GAO report from 2023," Clack said. "It told us those close working conditions were the source of greater risk."
Understanding the decay rate of airborne viruses like those that cause bird flu will help us devise more effective protection for workers and animals from future infectious respiratory diseases.
Study explains Antarctic sea ice growth and sudden decline
Although climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would steadily dwindle, its extent grew for decades until 2016. A new study finds the ice finally receded when wind-driven upwelling unleashed warmer, deeper water.
A new Stanford University study has helped solve a mystery about dramatic swings in sea ice extent around Antarctica.
Despite rising global and regional temperatures, Antarctic sea ice expanded from the 1970s through 2015. Then, in 2016, sea ice extent declined abruptly to record lows and has not recovered.
Based on data gathered by floating, robotic probes, the new study links this unprecedented sea ice loss to the rapid release of accumulated ocean heat. That heat had built up prior to 2015 as increased precipitation formed a less salty, lower-density lid on the ocean’s surface, effectively trapping warmer, deeper water. An increase in stormy weather around Antarctica in recent decades, likely tied to climate change, led to more upwelling, eventually bringing on the low-ice era.
“We’ve traced the recent extremes in sea ice extent to the combination of enhanced precipitation and upwelling due to winds,” said Earle Wilson, an assistant professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and lead author of the study published March 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We identified these two competing effects, both of which were increasing in concert with each other, but by different amounts over the years. For a while, precipitation was winning until upwelling took over.”
The findings significantly add to the complex picture of conditions at the bottom of the world, where the Southern Ocean drives global ocean circulation and absorbs much of the heat trapped by emissions from human activity. The results also dovetail with other recent research by Wilson’s group attributing the perplexing decades-long cooling trend in the Southern Ocean to underestimated rainfall and meltwater.
“The Southern Ocean is a central cog in the global climate system, and sea ice mediates much of what happens there,” said Wilson. “To establish confidence in our regional climate projections, including for processes such as Antarctic ice sheet melting and sea level rise, we need to understand the mechanisms that drive Antarctic sea ice variability.”
Valuable under-ice data
For the study, Wilson and his coauthors took advantage of a rich, yet seldom-accessed dataset for Antarctic sea ice research.
Over the past quarter-century, collection of subsurface data has advanced greatly thanks to the deployment of thousands of autonomous floats that comprise the global Argo array. While the floats operate mostly in open water outside the Antarctic sea ice zone, some floats also travel below the seasonal ice, cruising along, taking readings, and resurfacing come summertime to transmit their gathered data. The Stanford researchers compiled and analyzed 20 years of this overlooked under-ice data.
“It was very exciting to be able to use a combination of data and idealized modeling to explain both the observed expansion and retreat phases of sea ice,” said study coauthor Lexi Arlen, a PhD student in Earth system science in the Polar Ocean Dynamics Group led by Wilson.
“It has been enlightening to finally have enough broadly distributed under-ice data to discern year-to-year ocean trends around Antarctica,” said Wilson. “Our paper is one of the first to fully leverage these data to explain Antarctic sea ice trends over the past two decades.”
Partitioned waters
A key insight from the research team’s data analysis is that upwelling of warm water surprisingly started several years before the sea ice reversal of the mid-2010s. “These data told us another process must have delayed the release of subsurface warm water and thus sea ice decline, which led us to examine salinity and freshwater trends,” said Wilson.
Increases in precipitation, including snow and rainfall, over the Southern Ocean are known to make surface waters less salty and less dense than deeper waters, stratifying the water column into separate salinity and density regimes. In recent years, this stratification became stronger, making it harder for the waters to mix vertically and even out their temperatures.
The deeper layer in the Southern Ocean runs about two to three degrees warmer than the colder surface water, which is exposed to the frigid atmosphere and registers right around freezing. The trapping of that relatively warmer water allowed sea ice to expand, even against background climatic warming, until prevailing winds caused enough upwelling to force sea ice retreat.
Complicating this explanation, however, is that the Argo floats did not detect the same set of conditions on the Pacific-facing side west of the Antarctic Peninsula, wrapping around to the Ross Sea, as were detected on the Atlantic side. Yet sea ice expanded and contracted on the Pacific side as well.
“We saw opposite trends in the Pacific sector, with the ocean interior getting cooler rather than warmer after the sea ice declined,” said Wilson. “This remains an unanswered part of the puzzle.”
The researchers plan to study and model other mechanisms that could be having a stronger impact on the Pacific side, which also likely play roles throughout the region. Examples include changes in sea ice drift and increases in turbulent ocean mixing due to more frequent storms.
“The ocean has a long memory and can drive multiyear changes in ways weather can't,” said Wilson. “We plan to continue monitoring the ocean data and work toward developing a theory that will help us anticipate changes in Antarctic sea ice extent in decades to come.”
Acknowledgements:
Co-author Ethan C. Campbell is affiliated with University of Washington. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Washington Research Foundation. The Argo float data analysis was supported through a Big Ideas for Oceans grant from the Oceans Department and the Woods Institute for the Environment in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Mussels from Washington state waters. This common coastal species often consumed by humans can also be used to study the impacts of environmental variability.
Intertidal mussels, forming bumpy layers on shoreline rocks, withstand significant temperature swings as the tide ebbs and flows. These creatures live in one of the most thermally variable environments on Earth, but a new study shows that the rate, timing and duration of heating and cooling impact their metabolic rate, a proxy for overall health. At the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories, researchers exposed mussels to temperature regimens with equal highs and lows but different patterns of change. Even when the average temperature for a set period was the same, the mussels’ response was distinct. These results, published March 19 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that predicting how marine organisms respond to climate change means considering how temperature changes over time, not just how warm it gets.
For more information, contact lead author Michael Nishizaki, assistant professor of biology at the College of the Holy Cross and a mentor for the UW Friday Harbor Laboratories REU program, at mnishizaki@holycross.edu.
Tiny geometric algae, called diatoms, produce nearly a quarter of the world’s organic matter by photosynthesis. In the microscopic marine universe, diatoms coexist with both harmful and helpful bacteria. A new study, published March 23 in mBio, describes how a recently identified species of marine bacteria targets diatoms based on growth phase and nutrient availability. Growing diatoms can resist bacterial attacks, but when growth ceases, the bacteria modulate their gene expression patterns to become aggressive — first swimming and releasing compounds that damage the diatom and then clustering around them to feed. Bacteria can also overcome the diatom’s defenses in nutrient-rich environments. These findings highlight the dynamic relationship between bacteria and algae in the lab. Moving forward, researchers will explore what, if anything, changes in a more complex environment.
Credit: Abdul Waheed, Qiao Xu, Dong Cui, Murad Muhammad, Hailiang Xu, Aishajiang Aili, Amannisa Kuerban & Sajjad Ali
A new review highlights how a carbon-rich material made from agricultural waste could help reverse land degradation, boost food production, and strengthen climate resilience in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions.
“Biochar provides a powerful, nature-based solution that can simultaneously improve soil health, enhance water retention, and support sustainable agriculture in drylands,” the authors note, emphasizing its potential as a scalable strategy for climate adaptation.
Arid and semi-arid regions cover nearly 40 percent of the Earth’s land surface and face mounting pressure from desertification, water scarcity, and declining soil fertility. These challenges threaten global food security and ecosystem stability. Traditional approaches such as intensive fertilization or irrigation often provide only short-term benefits and may even worsen soil degradation over time.
The new study, published in Biochar, examines how biochar can address these issues through a combination of physical, chemical, and biological mechanisms. Biochar is produced by heating organic materials such as crop residues or wood waste in low-oxygen conditions, creating a stable form of carbon with a highly porous structure.
According to the review, biochar can improve soil water retention by 15 to 35 percent and increase microbial biomass by up to 50 percent. Its porous structure helps soils retain moisture in water-limited environments, while also creating habitats for beneficial microorganisms that support nutrient cycling.
The authors explain that these properties are especially valuable in dryland soils, which often contain very low organic matter and are prone to erosion and nutrient loss. By enhancing soil aggregation and reducing evaporation, biochar can stabilize soils and improve their capacity to support plant growth.
Field studies reviewed in the paper show that biochar application can increase crop yields, reduce erosion risks, and improve overall soil resilience. In some cases, vegetation biomass increased by as much as 30 to 50 percent in degraded landscapes following biochar amendment.
Beyond improving soil fertility, biochar also plays a role in climate mitigation. Because it is composed of stable carbon structures, it can store carbon in soils for decades to centuries. The study estimates that biochar systems could contribute significantly to global carbon sequestration efforts, helping offset greenhouse gas emissions.
The review also highlights emerging innovations that could enhance biochar’s impact. These include precision agriculture techniques such as drone-assisted application, co-composting biochar with organic waste to create nutrient-rich fertilizers, and integrating biochar production with renewable energy systems like solar-powered pyrolysis.
Despite its promise, the authors caution that biochar is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Its effectiveness depends on factors such as feedstock type, production conditions, and local soil characteristics. In some cases, inappropriate biochar formulations could even limit nutrient availability or worsen salinity issues.
Economic challenges also remain. Biochar production costs can range from hundreds of dollars per ton, with feedstock collection and processing accounting for a large share of expenses. The authors stress that developing cost-effective supply chains and aligning biochar systems with local conditions will be essential for large-scale adoption.
Looking ahead, the researchers call for coordinated efforts across science, policy, and industry to optimize biochar technologies and evaluate their long-term impacts. They argue that integrating biochar into broader land management strategies could unlock significant benefits for both agriculture and the environment.
As climate change accelerates and land degradation intensifies, solutions that can restore soils while capturing carbon are gaining urgency. This review positions biochar as a promising tool at the intersection of sustainable agriculture and climate action, offering a pathway toward more resilient dryland ecosystems.
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Journal Reference: Waheed, A., Xu, Q., Cui, D. et al. Biochar as a climate-smart strategy for restoring dryland soils and mitigating desertification. Biochar8, 59 (2026).
Biochar (e-ISSN: 2524-7867) is the first journal dedicated exclusively to biochar research, spanning agronomy, environmental science, and materials science. It publishes original studies on biochar production, processing, and applications—such as bioenergy, environmental remediation, soil enhancement, climate mitigation, water treatment, and sustainability analysis. The journal serves as an innovative and professional platform for global researchers to share advances in this rapidly expanding field.
Researchers have developed a new type of engineered biochar that can deliver oxygen in a controlled and stable way, offering a promising solution for environmental remediation and sustainable water and soil management.
“Oxygen supply is critical for maintaining healthy ecosystems, but current materials often release oxygen too quickly or unpredictably,” said the study’s corresponding author. “Our work shows how biochar can be precisely designed to overcome these limitations and provide reliable oxygen delivery under real-world conditions.”
Slow-release oxygen materials such as calcium peroxide are widely used to improve oxygen levels in aquaculture systems and contaminated soils. However, their performance is highly sensitive to environmental factors such as pH, ionic strength, and existing oxygen levels. Under unfavorable conditions, these materials can release oxygen too rapidly or inefficiently, limiting their effectiveness.
To address this challenge, the research team designed a series of modified biochars derived from rice husks, an abundant agricultural waste. By combining chemical modification and structural engineering, they created biochar materials capable of stabilizing calcium peroxide and controlling how oxygen is released over time.
The study compared three modification strategies: nitric acid oxidation, potassium hydroxide activation, and phosphate loading. Each approach altered the surface chemistry and pore structure of the biochar in different ways.
Among them, phosphate-modified biochar emerged as the most effective. It achieved a high loading of calcium peroxide while enabling a slow and sustained release of oxygen. This improved performance was linked to the formation of stable calcium–phosphorus bonds, which helped anchor the oxygen-releasing compound and regulate its behavior.
In contrast, biochar treated with nitric acid showed poor performance due to damage to its pore structure and increased acidity, which reduced its ability to hold calcium peroxide. Meanwhile, potassium hydroxide activation produced extremely high surface area biochar with rapid oxygen release, but less control over release stability.
The researchers also found that both chemical and physical properties of biochar play key roles in determining performance. Phosphorus content and pore size distribution were critical for loading capacity, while surface functional groups and material composition influenced how quickly oxygen was released.
Importantly, the phosphate-modified biochar demonstrated strong environmental adaptability. Its oxygen release remained stable across a range of pH levels, ionic strengths, and initial oxygen concentrations. This robustness makes it particularly suitable for complex natural environments where conditions can vary widely.
“Our findings highlight that the interaction between material structure and environmental conditions is dynamic,” the authors explained. “By tuning biochar properties, we can design oxygen-releasing materials that perform reliably in diverse settings.”
This research provides new insights into how biochar can be engineered as a functional carrier for controlled-release systems. Beyond oxygen delivery, the design principles identified in this study could be applied to other environmental technologies, including pollutant removal and nutrient management.
As global demand grows for sustainable and efficient environmental solutions, advanced biochar materials like these could play an important role in improving ecosystem health while making use of renewable biomass resources.
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Journal Reference: Zhang, W., Jiang, S., Wang, Y. et al. Chemical anchoring of CaO2 on phosphate-modified rice husk biochar for stabilized oxygen release. Biochar8, 58 (2026).
Biochar (e-ISSN: 2524-7867) is the first journal dedicated exclusively to biochar research, spanning agronomy, environmental science, and materials science. It publishes original studies on biochar production, processing, and applications—such as bioenergy, environmental remediation, soil enhancement, climate mitigation, water treatment, and sustainability analysis. The journal serves as an innovative and professional platform for global researchers to share advances in this rapidly expanding field.
Credit: Gehao Zhang, Lei Deng, Yang Liao, Jianzhao Wu, Xining Zhao & Zhouping Shangguan
A new global analysis reveals that tiny soil microbes play a decisive role in determining whether biochar can effectively lock carbon into agricultural soils, offering new insights for climate change mitigation.
“Biochar has long been recognized as a promising tool for storing carbon in soils, but our study shows that microbes ultimately decide how effective it is,” said the study’s corresponding author. “Understanding these biological mechanisms allows us to better predict where and how biochar will work.”
Biochar, a carbon-rich material produced from biomass, has gained attention as a negative emission technology. When added to soil, it can increase soil organic carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, its performance varies widely across environments, and the reasons behind this variability have remained unclear.
To address this gap, researchers conducted a large-scale meta-analysis of 76 peer-reviewed studies, covering 221 experimental comparisons worldwide. Their results show that biochar increases soil organic carbon by an average of 52.4 percent, confirming its strong potential for carbon sequestration.
But the study goes further by uncovering the biological drivers behind this effect. The researchers found that the composition of soil microbial communities plays a central role in determining how much carbon is stored.
Certain microbial groups, such as Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria, were associated with significantly greater carbon gains. These microbes are considered “broad-niche” organisms that can rapidly utilize available nutrients and convert them into stable soil carbon. In systems where these microbes dominated, carbon increases exceeded the global average.
In contrast, soils dominated by oligotrophic microbes such as Acidobacteria and Chloroflexi showed much smaller gains. These organisms are adapted to low-nutrient environments and tend to use carbon less efficiently, sometimes even accelerating its loss from soil.
The findings suggest that microbial community structure can serve as a powerful indicator of whether biochar will succeed in a given environment.
Environmental conditions also played an important role. The study found that biochar was most effective in dry regions with lower rainfall and in soils with higher pH. In wetter climates, excess moisture can limit oxygen availability, shift microbial communities toward less efficient carbon users, and increase carbon loss through leaching.
Additionally, the benefits of biochar were strongest shortly after application and tended to decline over time, highlighting the importance of long-term management strategies.
“These results show that biochar is not a one-size-fits-all solution,” the authors noted. “Its effectiveness depends on the interaction between soil conditions, climate, and especially microbial communities.”
The study provides a new framework for optimizing biochar use in agriculture. By considering microbial indicators alongside soil and climate factors, farmers and land managers may be able to identify where biochar applications will deliver the greatest climate benefits.
As global efforts to reduce atmospheric carbon intensify, this research highlights the importance of looking below ground. The invisible world of soil microbes may hold the key to turning biochar into a more reliable and scalable climate solution.
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Journal Reference: Zhang, G., Deng, L., Liao, Y. et al. Microbial regulation mechanisms of soil organic carbon sequestration by biochar application. Biochar8, 57 (2026).
Biochar (e-ISSN: 2524-7867) is the first journal dedicated exclusively to biochar research, spanning agronomy, environmental science, and materials science. It publishes original studies on biochar production, processing, and applications—such as bioenergy, environmental remediation, soil enhancement, climate mitigation, water treatment, and sustainability analysis. The journal serves as an innovative and professional platform for global researchers to share advances in this rapidly expanding field.
