In the more than two months since the Jan. 9 chemical spill into West Virginia's Elk River, new findings reveal the nature of the chemicals that were released into the water and then into the air in residents' houses.

Virginia Tech faculty engineers and students are unravelling fundamental chemical and health properties of the chemical that contaminated the drinking water for the residents of West Virginia.

The proposed naming process begins by sampling and sequencing an organism’s DNA. The sequence is then used to generate a code unique to that individual organism based on its similarity to all previously sequenced organisms.

Mollusk researchers at Virginia Tech in the U.S. and at the Freshwater Fisheries Research Center in Wuxi, China, are collaborating to promote freshwater mussel conservation, develop more robust and productive pearl-producing Chinese mussels, and possibly introduce a U.S. mussel to China that has the potential to produce colored pearls.