Insect pests, such as aphids, are capable of decimating crop yields, leading to severe economic loss. Some plants, however, have developed traits that make them resistant to such pests. Identifying these traits in plants, however, is not simple. Dr. Haydee Laza from Texas Tech University has worked with colleagues to identify several sorghum aphidresistant leaf structure traits in sorghums. These traits can be used as the basis for developing future screening methods for identifying aphid resistance in sorghums, subsequently protecting future crop yields.

Water resources are essential for human life. Knowing how to manage water, both now and in the future, is necessary to continue using it as well as possible. Nick Martin and Jeremy White are examining limitations to artificial intelligence applications in water resources generated from noisy and estimated data sets. For poor quality data sets, they found that machine learning models will perform poorly relative to tools that explicitly include physics-based descriptions of physical processes; this is because physics-based calculations can use both data and physics knowledge through data assimilation techniques.

Sustainable decision-making requires balancing the costs borne by today’s society with those that will fall on future generations. Climate change is intensifying extreme weather, making floods more severe because a warmer atmosphere can hold and deliver a larger volume of water as precipitation. It may also be the case that severe floods are becoming more frequent as drought becomes more frequent, average conditions rarely occur, and weather oscillates between short duration wet and long duration dry extremes. Worryingly, traditional infrastructure (often designed using outdated, backward-looking models) risks failing under these evolving conditions.
Nick Martin from Vodanube LLC, and his colleagues have applied Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to flood inundation. Their research optimises current adaptation and future mitigation strategies, even while acknowledging PRA’s limitations. The team demonstrates how this approach can guide more resilient water resource management, and highlights opportunities for further study.

Hydrogen is often touted as the fuel of the future, but how much can it really contribute to global decarbonisation? Dr James D. Burrington, founder of NiceChemistry.com, has modelled how hydrogen technologies, particularly green hydrogen, might support worldwide net zero goals. His research applies rigorous metrics to assess energy efficiency, cost, emissions, and land use. This revealed that, while hydrogen may not directly replace electricity, it could be critical in decarbonising sectors where electrification falls short.