A team led by David Lapola has built AmazonFACE: six metal-ring apparatuses in an Amazon forest north of Manaus that will raise CO2 inside three rings to about 620 ppm while leaving three as untreated controls, to test how the rainforest will respond to future atmospheric carbon. The experiment targets the core claim that elevated CO2 boosts photosynthesis and thus long-term carbon storage - the so-called fertilization effect - and asks whether that extra carbon becomes durable trunk tissue or is lost back to the soil and atmosphere. The project is explicitly designed to probe nutrient limits (especially low phosphorus on terra firme soils) and to measure how reduced stomatal opening under higher CO2 alters tree water use and local hydrology.
Sensors and instruments will monitor CO2, wind, sap flow, trunk diameter, root growth (via buried cameras and tubes), soil water and nutrients, and greenhouse gas fluxes over a decade. Previous FACE work in temperate forests, including a 2017 eucalyptus study, found increased photosynthesis did not equate to greater carbon storage, possibly due to phosphorus constraints; AmazonFACE is the first experiment to test those dynamics in a hyperdiverse tropical system. The project, coordinated by INPA and Unicamp, overcame funding and construction delays with UK and Brazilian support and will supply empirical data to refine climate models and carbon-budget expectations.
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Frontier labs and neolabs face the challenge of balancing groundbreaking research with building scalable businesses, often with low odds of success for both. A proposed solution is to focus neolabs solely on pioneering research, accepting minimal revenue and aiming for acquisition if successful. (alexwang.ai)
Scientists found 1.7-billion-year-old fossils in Australia that are among the oldest known eukaryotes, revealing their presence in oxygen-rich environments. The findings support the idea that oxygen was essential for the emergence of complex life on Earth. (sciencedaily.com)
The strong interaction between quarks is less precisely understood than electromagnetic forces, with current measurements uncertain to about one percent. Recent research has reduced this uncertainty to five parts per mille, aiding future high-precision physics experiments. (cerncourier.com)
A clinical trial for a new drug candidate targeting prion diseases has begun enrolling participants. Prion diseases are fatal, long-lasting conditions caused by infectious proteins, including Creutzfeld-Jacob and scrapie. (broadinstitute.org)
Claude Code was used by a user to find a planet that might be unknown. Access to the post is blocked by network security measures. (reddit.com)
GPGPU-SIM is a cycle-level simulator that models modern NVIDIA GPUs running CUDA and OpenCL workloads. It supports features like TensorCores, CUDA Dynamic Parallelism, and includes tools for performance visualization and energy modeling. (github.com)
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