In Hawaii, ocean trash — including old fishing nets — is being recycled to cover roads. The process is experimental, but it shows promise as a way to deal with a growing pollutant: plastic.

Paving with plastic is being done elsewhere, such as Missouri and Texas. But Hawaii is the first state to try adding marine debris. Its islands currently face a unique exposure to trashed plastic. It comes from discarded fishing gear, but also tourist wastes. There’s even some plastic released from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. 

So far, people have pulled 90 metric tons (roughly 200,000 pounds) of plastic trash from the Pacific Ocean. More than one metric ton (2,200 pounds) of fishing nets alone have been used in paving Hawaiian roads.

One key question is whether the pavement’s wear and tear might shed microplastics — tiny bits of this embedded trash.

“We’re extremely concerned about the shedding of plastics or other chemicals into the environment,” says Jennifer Lynch. This can expose people and animals to toxic plastic additives. Lynch is a chemist. She heads the Center for Marine Debris Research at Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

Her team shared its findings March 22 at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Atlanta, Ga.

Plastic for pavement

Lynch’s center runs a Nets-to-Roads program. Researchers collect and sort plastic and other marine debris gathered from beaches. Then they pick out waste made with polyethylene (Pah-lee-ETH-ih-leen). It’s a durable plastic found in such things as milk jugs, yogurt containers and fishing nets.

The Hawaii team sends the waste and nets to the U.S. mainland. There they get shredded and ground up. Then the materials come back to Hawaii. At a facility on the island of Oahu, they’re mixed with other ingredients to make asphalt. That’s the black, gooey stuff made from petroleum that’s often used to pave roads.

Once loaded onto trucks, this hot mix was used to cover stretches of road on the southwestern side of the island, Lynch says.

Three experimental strips went down in 2022. One had a section of traditional asphalt mixed with a rubber called styrene-butadiene-styrene. That rubber adds durability and flexibility. Ground marine waste and the rubber were added to a second batch. A third contained the marine waste and asphalt but no rubber.

Eleven months later, researchers collected road samples. They wanted to test it for escaping microplastics before taking the project to more roads, Lynch explains. They exposed the samples to conditions that mimic what might release microplastics. For example, they modeled stormwater running off a road or gravelly dust being swept from the road by traffic.

Water and dust from pavement with ocean trash contained amounts of microplastics similar to what was seen from samples of the asphalt with no plastic, says Jeremy Axworthy. He’s a marine biologist who worked on the program. He presented the team’s results at the ACS meeting.

Road recipes

Phase two of this program launched in 2024. It tested five types of pavement, including combos with and without rubber and plastic. Some contained ground-up fishing nets. Others contained other plastic trash. Data on which performed best should be available soon.

Bill Buttlar directs the Mizzou Asphalt Pavement and Innovation Lab. It’s at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He’s impressed with the program. Still, he notes that Hawaii’s roads face different challenges than those on the U.S. mainland. Hawaii’s tropical climate brings heavy rains. And volcanic activity there causes the ground to constantly shift, which can crack roads. “The main challenge to scaling this is getting the recipe right,” Buttlar says. “What works in Hawaii may be a little different than what works in the [U.S.] Midwest.”

As a species, humans like it cold.

Even now, we live in an “ice age.” Though the term may bring to mind saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths, such ages are defined by ice caps at the poles. And for most of its 4.6-billion-year history, our planet was too warm — sometimes far too warm — for polar ice.

For more eons than not, Earth has ranged from steamy to downright hellish.

A look back at Earth’s history shows us how fragile and fleeting our current moment is. Between its fiery infancy and its (for now) chilly present, Earth’s climate has taken many forms.

Learning why Earth’s climate changed in the past — and what happened to life when it did — can help us understand where we are today. We know our species evolved in the cold. Yet human-caused warming has set our planet onto a hot new path.

What can the past teach us about where we might be headed?

Hadean Eon: Hell on Earth

Earth’s turbulent infancy began some 4.6 billion years ago. Clumps of material formed out of the disk of hot dust and gas that swirled around the young sun.

About 100 million years later, a Mars-sized rock called Theia smacked into the young Earth. That run-in released the energy equivalent of trillions of hydrogen bombs. It was enough “to pretty much vaporize most of Theia and melt what becomes the Earth,” says Norman Sleep. He’s a planetary scientist at Stanford University in California.

That collision left the planet a hellish ocean of magma beneath a sky of rock vapor. Weak sunlight beat down on a cracked crust of black-gray basalt. In the sky hung a second ball of glowing magma: the moon. This orb had formed from the impact debris, maybe in just a few hours.

This was the Hadean Eon — the hottest Earth has ever been. Over the next 1,000 years, Earth cooled somewhat. Rock vapor in the atmosphere would have condensed and fallen — think showers of lava or perhaps flakes of rocky snow.

The magma ocean solidified more slowly. The young moon heated Earth via the force of its gravity. This kneaded Earth’s interior and kept the planet molten for perhaps tens of millions of years.

Finally, that magma ocean crystallized into rock.

This marked a turning point for our planet, Sleep says. The sun became its most important source of energy. Ever since, Earth’s climate has been driven by how much solar energy it gets, reflects and retains.

Archean Eon: Earth’s thermostat turns on

The Archean Eon stretched from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. It began when Earth’s surface cooled enough to form solid rock. Back then, the young sun was only about 70 to 80 percent as bright as it is today. Its energy alone would not have been enough to keep the planet as warm as it was.

In theory, Earth should have cooled enough to ice over. But it didn’t. Why?

As the Earth cooled, it produced a thick, steamy atmosphere. Water vapor fell as rain. A lot of rain. It poured until Earth’s surface drowned beneath a global ocean once more — this time, of water.

The cooling planet also released greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane. These acted like a blanket to trap heat around Earth. “There was a bigger greenhouse effect” than today, says David Catling. A planetary scientist, he works at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At around the same time, another major change kicked in: the carbon cycle. This acts as the planet’s natural thermostat.

Here’s how it works. Through the greenhouse effect, CO₂ in the atmosphere warms Earth’s surface. A process called chemical weathering traps some of that CO₂ in minerals called carbonates. They can stay trapped in rocks for a long time. Over hundreds of thousands of years, however, the movements of Earth’s tectonic plates recycle Earth’s surface into its interior.

In Earth’s mantle, the carbonates break down. Their carbon then gets belched back up by volcanoes as CO₂. Back in the air, it once again warms the planet.

This cycle is sensitive to temperature: Chemical weathering speeds up in warm climates and slows in cold ones. The overall effect helps keep temps fairly stable.

By the early Archean, the carbon cycle had locked away enough CO₂ to bring temps into a range habitable for life. Modeling studies suggest the planet ranged between a frosty zero degrees and a toasty 40° Celsius (32° to 104° Fahrenheit). In fact, the earliest signs of life date to this period.

Snowball Earth: A deep freeze

Between 2.4 billion and 2.1 billion years ago, Earth froze over. Thick sheets of ice encased the planet from pole to equator. Temperatures may have plummeted to as low as -50 °C (-58 °F) and stayed low for tens of millions of years.

This deep freeze was one of several icy episodes called Snowball Earths. They bookend the otherwise toasty Proterozoic (PRO-tur-eh-ZOH-ik) Eon. It stretched from 2.5 billion to 541 million years ago.

The ice sheets grew through a runaway feedback loop. Sparkling white ice reflects more sunlight than does land or water. That lowers temperatures, which encourages even more ice to form. Once polar ice creeps past a latitude of about 30° North or South, the planet will become a snowball.

“Once you reach that tipping point in the area of sea ice, then it takes on the order of 200 or 300 years to reach the fully [iced-over] state,” says field geologist Paul Hoffman of the University of Victoria in Canada. “That’s pretty quick on a geological time scale.”

Glacial rock deposits that formed at the equator are evidence that the Snowballs happened. But how they started remains a mystery. One theory blames biology.

Clues from ancient rocks suggest the Proterozoic oceans bloomed with photosynthetic organisms. They would have released lots of oxygen into the air. Oxygen breaks down methane. So it ate away the methane blanket that had kept Earth warm for 1.5 billion years.

The carbon cycle wouldn’t have been able to keep up, Catling says. Eventually, “you could grow ice sheets and make a Snowball Earth.”

Earth’s thermostat won’t let a Snowball go on forever. As the land freezes over, chemical weathering shuts down. But volcanoes don’t. They keep pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere. Eventually, the greenhouse effect will thaw out the planet. As that ice melts, the planet will reflect less sunlight. The bonus energy will warm the planet even more. Suddenly, the ice retreats.

Permian Period: Warming and mass extinction

Today, ice persists at Earth’s poles. These “icehouse” periods are few and far between in Earth’s history.

The last one was in the early Permian Period. This was about 300 million years ago. The average temperature was probably 15 degrees C (27 degrees F) cooler than today. Earth might have looked a bit like it did 20,000 years ago. That’s when woolly mammoths roamed Europe.

This cold spell lasted for 105 million years. Then climate change transformed the land into a scorched — and possibly toxic — wasteland.

Over some 20 million years, things started getting less friendly to life, says Neil Tabor. He’s a geologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Why? In part this was thanks to the assembly of the supercontinent Pangaea. As more land crammed together, coastlines shrunk and sea levels dropped. Coastal areas dried out, and throughout the parched continental interior, temperatures swung wildly.

Then huge volcanoes in what’s now Siberia started erupting. They didn’t stop for 1 million years.

Over that time, they spewed enough lava to bury an area as large as the continental United States under 50 meters (160 feet) of molten rock! With all that lava came lots and lots more CO₂. And that made surface temperatures soar.

In a geologic blink — perhaps as quickly as 60,000 years — average temps jumped as much as 10 degrees C (18 degrees F), reaching around 30 °C (90 °F). Oceans sweltered and grew too sluggish to circulate oxygen. Much marine life suffocated.

Bacteria that thrived in the oxygen-deprived depths poisoned the water with hydrogen sulfide. That deadly gas might have bubbled up to poison the land, too. Volcanic gas mixed with water to rain acid on the barren, dusty wastes.

On land, there were “toxic, salty, shallow acid lakes,” says Kathleen Benison. “And lots of windblown, red dust.” A geologist, Benison studies the Permian climate. She works at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

Near the end of the Permian, some 252 million years ago, Pangaea was a sunbaked, dusty wasteland. Daytime air temperatures in the tropics hovered around 50 °C (122 °F). On the hottest days, they climbed to 73 °C (163 °F) — hot enough to destroy proteins. Any living thing that couldn’t flee to the poles would have been cooked alive.

The resulting mass extinction was the worst our planet has ever seen. In a few hundred thousand years, 70 percent of species on land disappeared. The seas were hit even harder: 95 percent of marine species died out.

It may have taken millions of years for life to recover.

The Permian offers a cautionary tale for our current moment.

“We’re still technically in an icehouse, but we’re rapidly going towards a greenhouse,” Benison says. “Looking back at the [end of the Permian] is a good way to try to say what happens with these big changes. And not just what happens with climate, but what happens to life.”

Cretaceous Period: Gradual heat

A greenhouse doesn’t always lead to mass extinctions, though. By 90 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period, the planet was a lush jungle world. Vast swaths of the continents were flooded by shallow seas. In some areas, carnivorous dinosaurs like Spinosaurus prowled the shores. At 36 °C (97 °F), Earth’s average surface temps hovered around human body temperature. Even polar seawater was a soupy 27 °C (81 °F).

Despite that, this period saw “no mass extinction,” says Brian Huber. He’s a geologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Huber was part of a team that charted Earth’s surface temps for the last 485 million years. This timeline revealed a super-hot greenhouse environment. In fact, it was the hottest Earth has ever been since the evolution of any life more complex than a microbe.

Scientists aren’t sure what drove temperatures so high. But it’s clear that the rise was fairly gradual.

There was no 10-degree jump like the one that rocked the Permian. Instead, Earth had been hot for a long time. In fact, it never really cooled down after the Permian extinction. Average surface temps worldwide mostly stayed above 20 °C (68 °F). (For comparison, that’s just 5 degrees C [9 degrees F] hotter than it was in 2024.) And the poles were largely ice-free throughout the dinosaurs’ nearly 180-million-year reign.

So perhaps the Permian extinction was so massive because of the swing from icehouse to greenhouse. An abrupt change may have put ecosystems under additional stress. That would be bad news, considering what’s happening today.

What’s next for Earth’s climate?

Following a 50-million-year cooling, we’re now in an icehouse period.

The time 55 million years ago was known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. It was the hottest period in the history of our Earth — that planet with the continents and ecosystems we know today.

Atmospheric CO₂ levels were high, and temps reached an average of up to 34 °C (93 °F). Unlike us, creatures that lived back then were used to an iceless planet. There was no mass extinction, but ecosystems shifted. And many species died out in parts of their ranges. Some disappeared completely.

Since the PETM, Earth has been cooling down. This could be due in large part to the rise of the Himalayan mountain range in Asia. Chemical weathering of all that fresh rock could have driven steady drops in atmospheric CO₂. By 34 million years ago, Antarctica was cold enough for year-round ice. And by 800,000 years ago, CO₂ levels fell below about 300 parts per million (ppm).

But in just the past 200 years, human activities have driven airborne CO₂ levels back up. Emissions — such as from coal-fired power plants and gas-fueled cars — have nearly doubled CO₂ levels, from 280 ppm to 426 ppm. Average temperatures have ticked up by 1.47 degrees C (2.65 degrees F).

If nothing major changes in our approach to climate change, this will be just the beginning. By 2100, CO₂ levels could reach 600 ppm. Some climate models show it could soar above 1,000 ppm. That could result in average temperatures 4 degrees C (7 degrees F) warmer than in preindustrial times.

If we’d been around in the PETM, we’d have had to migrate to the poles to survive. That’s bad news for today’s humans. Cities can’t exactly get up and move. By the end of this century, billions of people will routinely face heat and humidity extremes beyond the limits of human survival.

The next glacial period will start later than expected, if at all. And by 2500, four-tenths of all land will have become unsuitable for its current biome, scientists predict.

This glimpse of a likely future is informed by our past. And it gives us the chance to choose a different path. Cutting carbon emissions can still slow warming and its impacts.

If extreme warming occurs, it would end the world as we know it. But it would not be the end of the world.

Even if we trigger a climate catastrophe on the scale of the Permian mass extinction, Earth’s history shows that the planet will recover and life will eventually thrive again. The carbon thermostat will correct our error — but it is very slow. We can’t wait millions of years for it to fix climate change for us.

Some clouds are flat. Others are puffy. Some are pretty and turn orange or red at sunrise or sunset. Others signal stormy weather and can produce precipitation, such as rain, hail or snow.

Meteorologists, or weather forecasters, spend lots of time predicting clouds. That’s because clouds are behind all storm systems — from tornadoes and hurricanes to rain and snowstorms. 

Technically speaking, a cloud is nothing more than a clump of aerosols — small solid or liquid particles suspended in the air. In some clouds, those aerosols can be bits of wildfire smoke or even desert dust.

But most clouds are made of water. A typical cloud droplet is only 20 micrometers (0.00008 inch) in diameter. That’s less than a thousandth the size of an average raindrop. Since cloud droplets are so tiny, they are very light. And that’s part of why clouds float.

These water droplets start to form through evaporation. Evaporation occurs when liquid water molecules become energized and change phase into a gas. Energy from the sun heats Earth’s surface — including water molecules in the ground as well as in oceans, lakes and rivers. Some water molecules become warmer, and more energized, than others. The most energized ones become a gas, known as water vapor.

Most air is made of N₂ — or two nitrogen atoms clumped together. A molecule of water vapor weighs less than this nitrogen molecule. That’s also partly why clouds float.

Why can we see clouds?

We can’t see water vapor on its own. Clouds become visible when water vapor condenses, or transforms back into a liquid. That happens when water vapor rises high enough in the atmosphere that it cools.

Gravity pulls those droplets toward the ground. But they’re so tiny that warm rising air keeps them suspended aloft. And even if a single cloud weighs tens of millions of kilograms (pounds), the air outside the cloud is a bit heavier still. So the cloud floats.

Sometimes, water vapor rises extra high. At 12,200 meters (40,000 feet) above the ground, the average temperature is –57° Celsius (–71° Fahrenheit). Here, it’s too cold for water droplets to form. Any water turns into tiny ice crystals.

That’s why clouds at high altitudes aren’t puffy. They aren’t made of liquid droplets. Made of ice crystals, they’re wispy-looking.

Different types of clouds

Some clouds form near the ground. Fog is a cloud that forms on the ground.

“When we see fog, that is simply a cloud at the surface,” wrote Brandon Richards, a meteorologist for Spectrum News Texas in Austin, in a text message. “Fog happens when the air is saturated.” That means the air is holding as much water as it can. The extra water condenses, forming a cloud.

Fog is one type of stratus cloud. The word stratus comes from the Latin word for “layer.” Other stratus clouds may form a few thousand meters (feet) above the ground. They’re usually pretty flat.

In summer, the sky might host puffy clouds. It can be fun to look for shapes in these cumulus clouds. Such clouds usually form a couple kilometers (miles) above the ground. They come together when pockets of warm air rise.

The highest types of common clouds are cirrus. They form 9,100 meters (30,000 feet) or more above the ground. At that height, they’re made of ice crystals, which gives them a wispy, hairlike appearance.

Different types of clouds can be present at the same time. And some clouds are actually a combination of different cloud types. Cirrostratus clouds are wispy like cirrus clouds, but flat and layered like stratus clouds. Stratocumulus clouds are layered but a bit puffy.

Rare clouds

Some clouds form in weird ways. Consider noctilucent clouds. The term noctilucent comes from Latin words that mean “light at night.” Earth’s highest clouds, these form at heights of 76 to 85 kilometers (47 to 53 miles).

There’s little water vapor at such altitudes. So how can clouds form there? Meteor smoke!

Meteors burn up in this part of the atmosphere, leaving behind smoke particles. Water droplets can glom onto these particles and turn into ice crystals. And being so high, these clouds can catch sunlight even after the sun has set (at ground level). These clouds shimmer, like blue, glow-in-the-dark curtains.

Another type of strange cloud is the pyrocumulonimbus (PY-roh-KEW-mew-lo-NIM-bus), or smoke cloud. Wildfires can release lots of smoke. As smoke and hot gases rise, they can form a thundercloud. From these clouds, wildfires sometimes produce their own thunderstorms, windstorms — or even fire tornadoes.

Precipitation and thunderstorms

Precipitation happens when a cloud can’t hold any more water. Tiny, light cloud droplets coalesce, or merge, into bigger droplets. Those that become heavy enough will fall out as rain.

Something similar happens when it’s cold. Tiny, chilly water droplets merge to form ice crystals. That’s what makes snowflakes in the wintertime. Snow falls more slowly than raindrops. While raindrops plummet as fast as 10 meters per second (22.4 miles per hour), snowflakes tend to glide down at a pokey 0.4 to 1.8 meters per second (0.9 to 4 miles per hour).

Thunderstorms can produce dangerous precipitation. These storms come from cumulonimbus clouds. That’s the technical name for thunderclouds.

Thunderclouds start as cumulus clouds — puffy clouds fairly close to the ground. Warm, wet air helps them grow taller. Some thunderclouds can rise into towers 16 kilometers (10 miles) tall. While the tops of these clouds are made of ice, their bottoms consist of water droplets.

Cumulonimbus clouds can produce thunder and lighting. Because they’re tall, they can lift water droplets very high before they finally fall. That’s how hail forms. High-up water droplets can cool and freeze into an ice pellet. As more droplets freeze onto the pellet, the hailstone grows. Some thunderclouds can produce chunks of ice the size of baseballs or bigger.

The most extreme thunderclouds become supercells. That’s a thundercloud that rotates. Changing winds blow different layers of the cloud in different directions. That causes the entire cloud to spin. Supercells occasionally spawn tornadoes.

But there’s a catch. Sometimes, clouds can limit the intensity of storms. Why? “Clouds, even light wispy ones, can affect how much [sunshine] reaches the ground,” explains Joey Krastel. He’s a meteorologist for the Maryland Department of Emergency Management in Hanover.

If you look out from a plane window, you can sometimes see shadows on the ground cast by individual clouds. That’s one sign of how much sunlight clouds can keep from reaching the ground. With less sunlight, the Earth’s surface cools. Now there’s less energy to evaporate water. With less warm and wet air, storms can’t form as easily.

“During storm outbreaks, thick cloud cover can limit surface heating and reduce storm energy and potential,” Krastel wrote via text message.

That’s why the stormiest days often begin with sunshine. It seems strange to think that sunshine actually helps storms, but it’s true. The more the air is heated by sunlight, the more it can rise — and the bigger storms will grow!

You may not know methanol by name, but this alcohol plays a big role in making a lot of the things in our lives. It’s an ingredient in plastics and paints, for instance. And being highly flammable, it can be used as a liquid fuel. But making it has typically required multiple steps and high heat. It also produced lots of wastes. Now scientists have found an easy way to make methanol that avoids many of those drawbacks.

Their trick: Add lightning.

Lightning is a form of plasma — what many scientists call the fourth state of matter. It forms from a high-voltage electrical pulse.

Researchers have now shown plasma can quickly convert methane — the main component of natural gas — into methanol. All it takes is adding electricity, they explain in the April 15 Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“Lightning” in a bottle makes methanol in a simple, one-step process, notes Dayne Swearer. A physical chemist and chemical engineer, he led the team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., that developed the technique.

Each year, companies around the world make up to 110 million metric tons (36.6 billion gallons) of methanol. “If we can offset a small fraction of that using … a simple process like this one,” Swearer says, “I think there’s a lot of cool opportunities.”

Lightning’s role

Chemists have been looking into using plasma in chemical reactions for more than a century. For Swearer, it’s a recent interest. He studies electromagnetic energy. “That’s the type of energy found in light or in electric fields, or that runs through wires,” he explains.

Working with that type of energy means understanding electrons — negatively charged subatomic particles. His team is studying ways to use electrons to transfer power.

“The electron really gives chemistry its flare,” he says. “It’s a really, really important part of chemical reactions.” He likens electrons to hooks that hold atoms together to make molecules. If you can unhook those electrons, he says, it’s possible to rearrange a molecule’s atoms.

The team used bottled lightning to remodel methane molecules. The change happens quickly. First, they pump methane gas into a cylinder immersed in water. The cylinder has tiny holes, or pores, on its sides. Then the device is electrified using a much higher voltage than comes from the outlets found in a home. “Our system compresses the electricity into pulses that turn off and on really fast,” Swearer says. “These short bursts help control the chemistry.”

As the gas moves through the cylinder and out the tiny holes, an electrical pulse rips through it. That pulse lights up like tiny bolts of lightning.

This process tears electrons from the methane molecules. These glowing, high-energy electrons form a plasma that smashes into other nearby molecules. Methane molecules have one carbon atom and four hydrogens. Water molecules have one oxygen and two hydrogens. The plasma breaks one hydrogen off of each molecule.

Those broken water and methane molecules find each other and snap together like puzzle pieces, says Swearer. “We click them together.” And when they do, they become methanol. The orphaned hydrogen atoms snap together to form hydrogen molecules.

Along with the methane gas, the porous cylinder contains a type of material called a catalyst. It helps the chemicals react correctly.

Toward greener chemistry

Chemists knew electricity could be used to remodel the molecules in a gas. But figuring out how to harness that knowledge in a useful way proved hard, Swearer says. One challenge was “really understanding what’s going on inside the plasma,” he says. He credits a graduate student, James Ho, with figuring out how the plasma was behaving.

Another challenge: Not all the methane will turn into methanol. Swearer’s team is currently investigating how to improve that conversion rate.

Using lightning in a bottle to make methanol is exciting, he says. But he cautions that his team’s process is experimental. It’s not ready to replace conventional ways of making methanol. Doing that will take years, Swearer says. One obstacle, he notes, is “just the cost of electricity” needed.

Still, the new findings suggest using plasma to make fuels could have a smaller climate impact than today’s standard methods, says P.J. Cullen. He’s a chemical engineer at the University of Sydney in Australia. Why? “No need for high temperature” to make them, he says. The high heat normally needed to make methanol comes from burning fossil fuels. The electricity used for the plasma could instead come from solar, wind or nuclear sources — sources that don’t add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Cullen’s group in Australia developed the plasma-making device that Swearer’s group uses. In the same journal as Swearer’s work, Cullen’s team describes a second way to convert methane to methanol with a plasma. (It, too, uses a catalyst, but one separated from the plasma.)

“Both papers point to the same main advantage,” Cullen says. Both make methanol without high heat.

These approaches both show the power of plasma, he says. They also point to how researchers could use this technology for cleaner, greener chemistry.

Metal-organic framework, (noun, “MEH-tal Or-GAN-ik FRAYM-werk”)

Metal-organic frameworks — or MOFs — are a type of material made of metal– and carbon-based molecules. These molecules are linked together into complex, 3-D shapes.

Imagine a house that’s being built. After laying the foundation, builders construct a skeleton-like wooden frame. This framework consists mostly of empty space. MOFs are structured much the same way. Their molecules assemble into a scaffold-like material. And like that wooden frame, an MOF’s interior is also mostly empty space.

Unlike the holes of a sponge, the empty spaces inside an MOF are not random. Scientists can choose the sizes, shapes and chemistry of these gaps. That’s important. It allows scientists to custom-make MOFs for specific tasks. A very porous MOF may be especially good at sopping up substances. Another MOF with certain chemistry may work like a filter, letting some substances through it but blocking others.

Scientists custom-build MOFs for many different uses. In medicine, MOFs may tote drugs to specific places inside the body for release. Or they might release medicines only under certain conditions.

MOFs may also help manage climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air. These MOFs often contain exposed metal ions. (An ion is an atom that carries an electric charge.) Those metal ions can bind to the oxygen atoms in CO₂ molecules, snatching them out of the atmosphere.

Still other MOFs can pull water from desert air and release it for drinking. Others can filter out harmful wavelengths of sunlight to protect crops. Or they can shield against toxic chemicals. In fact, MOFs have so many uses that they won the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

In a sentence

Scientists developed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that yank pollution from our water sources.

Check out the full list of Scientists Say.

It takes a village to deliver a whale calf. That’s what the most detailed video ever of a sperm whale birth shows.

In the footage, a female whale in labor is surrounded by others assisting her. Almost all of her helpers are female. But not all are related to the birthing mom. This shows that sperm whales benefit from cooperation, just as humans do.

Because getting to watch the birth of a whale is extremely rare, only a few scientific studies have described them. Some of those reports have noted other whales helping the mom through the birthing process. But scientists had never caught this on video.

In 2023, David Gruber was part of a team that got very lucky. Gruber is a marine biologist. He works with Project CETI, a nonprofit dedicated to sperm whale research. Project CETI is partly based on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea. Gruber was in a boat right off the coast when his team caught the birth.

The researchers weren’t looking for a whale birth. They just happened to be in the right place, at the right time — with the right equipment. Using two drones, the team caught the whole 34-minute birthing process on tape.

A group of 10 whales surrounded the laboring mom. After the birth, her assistants took turns lifting the newborn to the surface for hours. This allowed the calf to breathe air until it could swim on its own.

The whales seemed to include the scientists in this event, Gruber says. “They literally carried the baby right past the front of our boat.” His group shared its video in Science on March 26.

Helping hands — or fins

Project CETI has been studying sperm whales around Dominica for long enough that Gruber and his colleagues could identify every individual in the video. “Not only did we capture such an amazing dataset, but we actually knew each of these whales,” he says.

Computers tracked each whale’s position in the footage. Then, a team member labeled each animal. A whale named Rounder was giving birth, the researchers determined. They also figured out what each of the other 10 whales did and how they were related to the mom. 

Rounder’s helpers included whales from two different female lines. These are like whale families, also called kin groups. The kin groups’ teamwork was surprising, because these groups don’t usually spend time together searching for food. But whales from the two groups fully mixed for hours after the birth. All helped lift the newborn calf at some point.

The four whales that helped hold the calf the most were its mother, aunt, an older kin member and one whale from outside the calf’s kin group. Holding the baby up is very important, because it can’t float on its own yet. Without help, Gruber says, “it would have sunk.”

Killer whales, belugas and other cetaceans have also been seen pushing newborns to the surface. This behavior may go back to when those species shared a common ancestor, Gruber says.

The wails of labor

Along with the video, the researchers also recorded audio of the birth. They analyzed these sounds with help from some other researchers. 

Sperm whales make sounds called codas. The scientists looked for changes in things like the codas’ rhythm. Those codas changed during important moments in the birth. One specific coda was heard more frequently during the birth. The team reported its findings March 26 in Scientific Reports.

Different sounds being linked with the birth is not surprising, says Denise Herzing. She’s a marine biologist who heads the Wild Dolphin Project. Based in Jupiter, Fla., this nonprofit focuses on Atlantic spotted dolphins.

“Marine mammals, in general, have specific sounds during specific behavioral contexts,” says Herzing.

After the birth, the sperm whales also ran into several pilot whales. Now, the sperm whales’ vocal style changed more. That might be because pilot whales sometimes bother sperm whales.

It takes a village

Giving birth is one of the most critical moments of a female whale’s life. Such high stakes might have driven these mammals to evolve cooperative instincts, the researchers say.

This is spot on, Herzing says. “We see different alliances of dolphins grouping into bigger groups to fight off a predator or to mate.”

Sharing the birth with the world took cooperation from the human team, too. Many scientists had to work together to film the video, analyze it and map the relationships between the whales. “It was a very profound experience for all of us,” says Gruber.

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Nervous? One day soon, relief might be just a chew away.

For years, research has been showing that chemicals found in passionflower plants can help fight anxiety. Two teens have now created a chewing gum that can release those chemicals.

“Gum is very popular among high schoolers,” says Zackary Nizker, 16. This junior at McIntosh High School in Peachtree City, Ga., hopes this habit will make gum an easy way for teens to deal with anxiety. And there are many who face this. “In the U.S.,” Zackary says, “a third of all adolescents and young adults suffer from a form of anxiety.”

But teens aren’t the only ones who could use some relief. Zackary’s grandmother struggles with nervousness, which he says “got really severe last year.” The drugs she got prescribed help, he says, though their side effects can be “very severe.” In his grandma’s case, “she could hardly walk or stand. It was a very scary situation.”

Flavonoids are antioxidant chemicals made by many plants. The plants use them to fight tissue damage from oxidation. Many herbal remedies contain these compounds, too, notes Sara Hoti, Zackary’s classmate. Chamomile, used in some teas, is one flavonoid-loaded herb. But for their study, she and Zackary used an extract of a plant that grows wild in their hometown: passionflower (Passiflora incarnata).

Their work earned these teens a spot as finalists here at the 2026 Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair, or ISEF. It’s a program created and run by Society for Science (which also publishes this magazine). As fourth place winners in the Translational Medical Science division, Sara and Zackary took home $600. They were among 1,725 students — from 65 nations or territories — competing at the 76th annual ISEF. Participants this year shared nearly $7 million in prizes.

Flower-powered relief

“Chewing gum, by itself, is already known to reduce anxiety,” says Zackary. But a host of studies going back decades shows that passionflower flavonoids reduce anxiety. They do this, he explains, by increasing brain levels of a signaling compound known as GABA. (That’s short for gamma-aminobutyric acid.) “It slows down neuron firing in your brain,” Zackary says. That slowdown, he says, seems to calm an anxious brain.

By combining herbal remedies with rhythmic chewing, he says, their new gum could become “a more effective treatment.” But to test whether chewing gum would release any flavonoids in it, they needed to run some tests.

To start, they cooked up some bubble gum. It included a gum base, powdered sugar, various other sweeteners — and, of course, passionflower extract. 

The teens had hoped to make that extract. After all, Sara says, in her hometown, passionflowers are everywhere. But the pair did their experiment during the winter, when the flowers were “all gone — out of season.” So they ended up having to buy the extract.

Afterward, they tested their prototype gum — and struggled, Zackary recalls. Why? “We’re not allowed to just give people some random gum we made and say, ‘Here, chew this, let’s see if it works.’” Instead, they had to do tests “outside of the body.”

Double bubble testing

The pair conducted two tests. The first examined whether each quantity of gum contained the same dose of passionflower extract. So they analyzed slices of the gum under a microscope. Using computer software, they could calculate the share of the flavonoid particles in view. Here, Sara says, “you want your value to be below 15. We actually got a value of 8.4, which was perfect.” (In these tests, Zackary adds, the “values” do not come with a unit.)

A second test, called the Shinoda test, measured how well flavonoids in their gum resist breakdown. If they broke down, the likelihood they’d prove helpful against anxiety could fall apart, too. So the young scientists exposed their gum to various conditions and then used this color-changing test to check whether the flavonoids had held up.

This test is usually done with liquids. Their gum was a solid. So learning how to Shinoda test their gum proved a “really long process,” Sara says.

To mimic the work of saliva, they cut their gum into pieces and soaked them in alcohol for three hours. And nothing happened. The flavonoids never left the gum.

To use the gum you’d chew it, they realized, an action which could release the flavonoids. But “since we couldn’t chew it ourselves,” Zackary says, “we broke the gum into pieces with our hands. That simulates chewing.” They also extended their soak time to three days.

This time, “we got this bright orange coloration change,” says Sara. That showed that the gum’s flavonoids had been released but not broken down — even after exposure to hydrochloric acid and other harsh conditions.

In the future, the teens want to find ways to market their gum and test in people its ability to relieve anxiety.

“Medicated chewing gum is not a new thing,” says Sara. Energy-boosting gums, which release a stimulant, already exist. Smoking-cessation gum contains nicotine. And you can buy passionflower teas. But “nowhere on the market is there a gum for anxiety,” says Sara.

She hopes their recipe could help anyone who feels a bout of nervousness coming on. Maybe you’re “going into an interview or a presentation,” she says. “You can just [chew] this and you know, chill out.”

Computer-generated images have been around for decades. People use computers to make digital art and animations for movies, TV shows and video games. However, just like making a physical painting with a paintbrush, these images take a lot of time and human effort to produce.

The rise of artificial intelligence has drastically reduced the amount of time and effort it takes to create computer-generated images. New programs and websites can generate images using a text prompt from the user, such as “a picture of a tiger walking through a grassy field.” These programs can automatically generate artwork and photo-realistic images that can be difficult to tell apart from “real” photos and artwork. Can you tell which picture at the top of this story is real and which is AI-generated?

While AI-generated images might seem fun or harmless, they can also cause problems. People can use them to create deepfakes, or fake images of things that did not really happen. Some people might see the picture and believe that it is real. While fake news and fake images have been around for a long time, AI tools can make it easier and faster to produce this misleading content.

Can people tell the difference between real pictures and AI-generated pictures? How hard is it to spot “fake” pictures? In this science project you will find out!

Terms and concepts

• Computer-generated image
• Artificial intelligence
• Deepfake

Questions

• What are some uses for AI-generated images?
• What are some potential problems caused by AI-generated images?

Resources

• Axios (2023, July 31). How to spot deepfakes created by AI image generators. Retrieved September 14, 2023.
• Bond, S. (2023, June 13). AI-generated images are everywhere. Here’s how to spot them. NPR. Retrieved September 14, 2023.

Materials and equipment

• Internet access
• Digital camera or smartphone
• Optional: printer
• Volunteers
• Lab notebook

Experimental procedure

1. Decide on a topic or theme for your pictures. For example, you could use pictures of animals, flowers, scenery, vehicles or people.
2. Take at least 10 real pictures of the object/topic you decided on or find pictures online.
   1. Make sure you label or organize the images so you do not lose track of them later. (As an example, you could put all the real pictures in a folder on your computer.)
   2. If you are finding the pictures online, make sure they are from a legitimate source and you know they are real pictures. (See references in the Bibliography for tips.)
3. Find or make at least 10 AI-generated images of the same object/topic.
   1. You can search online for an “AI image generator” and you will find many options available. Some services might be built into major search engines. Others might have their own websites. Also note that some services might be free, or allow you to generate a limited number of images for free. But others might require a paid subscription.
   2. Follow the instructions for the website or program you decide to use to enter a prompt and generate an image. Since you will be comparing them to real images, make sure you generate “realistic” photos and not images that look like paintings or drawings.
   3. Save the images. Again, make sure you keep track of which images are real and which are AI-generated.
4. Prepare all the images for viewing by your volunteers. For example, you can label them 1 through 20 and put them in a random order in a different folder on your computer. Or you could print them. Make sure you keep track of which images are real and which are AI-generated. But this information should not be visible to your volunteers.
5. Prepare a data table like Table 1. In the second column, write whether each image is real or AI-generated.

Image number	Real or AI generated	Volunteer  1	Volunteer 2	Volunteer 3	Volunteer “real” responses	Volunteer “AI” responses	% of volunteers correct

6. One at a time, show each picture to a volunteer. Ask them whether they think the picture is real or AI-generated. Record their response in your data table.
7. Repeat the process for each volunteer.
8. For each image, add up the number of volunteers who said the image was real. Enter this value in your data table.
9. For each image, add up the number of volunteers who said the image was AI-generated. Enter this response in your data table.
10. Calculate the percentage of volunteers who correctly identified whether each individual image was real or AI-generated. Enter the percentage in your data table.
11. Create another data table like Table 2.

		Volunteer responses
		Real	AI-generated
Actual image	Real
	AI-generated

12. Analyze your data.
    • Overall, how good were your volunteers at correctly identifying real images as real?
    • Overall, how good were your volunteers at correctly identifying AI-generated images as AI-generated?
    • Are there large differences in your results between individual pictures? Were some pictures harder for your volunteers to correctly identify than others? Looking at the pictures, why do you think this occurred?

Variations

• Repeat the experiment with artwork instead of pictures. Can your volunteers tell the difference between real artwork and AI-generated art?
• Do the experiment with two groups of volunteers: a control group and a group that you have trained to spot AI-generated images. (See some of the references in the Bibliography.) Can people with training do a better job correctly identifying the images?
• Try the experiment with different categories of images/objects. Are some things easier for people to recognize than others? For example, what about pictures of inanimate objects vs. pictures of living things? What about pictures of “regular” people vs. famous people like politicians or actors?
• Compare different AI image generation websites or services. Are some better than others at producing convincing images?
• Do an experiment to find out if people can recognize AI-generated text instead of images.
• Can you produce fake news articles that include both images and text about real people or events? Run the experiment with both real and fake news articles. Can people tell which is which?

This activity is brought to you in partnership with Science Buddies. Find the original activity on the Science Buddies website.