Scientists have uncovered new details explaining why iron oxide minerals are such effective long-term carbon traps in soils.

Manganese oxide minerals, such as birnessite and related phases, play a pivotal role in environmental processes ranging from the sequestration of heavy metals to the cycling of water and redox-active ...

Phosphorus is a key element for all life on Earth. For decades, researchers thought that, in nature, only enzymes could transform organic phosphorus—phosphates within biomolecules—into its ...

In previous works, Aristilde and her team explored how clay minerals bind organic matter and how soil microbes preferentially turn non-sugar organics into carbon dioxide. In the new study, Aristilde's ...

Iron oxide in soil performs the same transformation as plants and microbes that are known to secrete enzymes to transform organic phosphorus into bioavailable inorganic phosphorus. Northwestern ...

Northwestern University researchers are actively overturning the conventional view of iron oxides as mere phosphorus “sinks.” A critical nutrient for life, most phosphorus in the soil is organic — ...

The Bayan Obo deposit is not only the world's largest rare earth deposit and the third-largest niobium deposit, but also a ...

When NASA's Mars rovers found manganese oxides in rocks in the Gale and Endeavor craters on Mars in 2014, the discovery sparked some scientists to suggest that the red planet might have once had more ...

Scientists know iron oxide minerals store large amounts of carbon in soils, but lack a detailed, quantitative understanding of the specific chemical mechanisms that allow them to bind such a wide ...

Non-uniform distribution of charges on the surface of iron oxides attracts diverse types of organic compounds through mechanisms with different binding energies. While scientists have long known that ...