CSIRO scientists have produced the first preliminary predictions of the potential impact of climate change on the Australian seabed.
The results of the five-year study predict potential high-risk areas due to seabed movement, erosion and changes in reef growth.
According to CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship project leader Dr Cedric Griffiths, the interaction between the ocean and the seabed is poorly understood.
Drugs made using unusual metals could form an effective treatment against colon and ovarian cancer, including cancerous cells that have developed immunity to other drugs, according to research at the University of Warwick and the University of Leeds.
The study, published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, showed that a range of compounds containing the two transition metals Ruthenium and Osmium, which are found in the same part of the periodic table as precious metals like platinum and gold, cause significant cell death in ovarian and colon cancer cells.
TORONTO, ON – According to a new study by geologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Maryland, the wealth of some minerals that lie in the rock beneath the Earth's surface may be extraterrestrial in origin.
"The extreme temperature at which the Earth's core formed more than four billion years ago would have completely stripped any precious metals from the rocky crust and deposited them in the core," says James Brenan of the Department of Geology at the University of Toronto and co-author of the study published in Nature Geoscience on October 18.
GRIMSBY, ONTARIO, CANADA – When Tony Garchinski heard a loud crash just after 9 p.m. on Friday, September 25 he didn't think much of it. That is, until he awoke the next morning to find the windshield of his mom's Nissan Pathfinder with a huge crack in it. Making note of the 'unusual' rocks he later found on the car's hood, Garchinski chalked the incident up to vandalism and filed a police report.
NEW YORK (Oct. 16, 2009) – The notion that training teachers in the rigors of hands-on science will directly improve their students' academic performance now has real data behind it: Research assembled over the last decade – now published in the Oct. 16 issue of Science – shows that high school students' pass rate on New York State standardized tests, called Regents examinations, can be significantly improved if they are among the lucky few to study under a teacher trained in Columbia University's Summer Research Program for Science Teachers.
Boulder, CO USA – Tree leaves may be powerful tools for monitoring air quality and planning biking routes and walking paths, suggests a new study by scientists at Western Washington University in Bellingham. The research will be presented at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.
Boulder, CO, USA -- A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a new study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.
Using satellite radar data and GPS measurements, Chinese researchers have explained the exceptional geological events leading to the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake that killed nearly 90 000 people in China's Sichuan Province.
"One of the very fundamental issues for understanding an earthquake is to know how the rupture is distributed on the fault plane, which is directly related to the amount of ground shaking and the damage it could cause at the surface," said Dr Jianbao Sun of the Institute of Geology, China Earthquake Administration (IGCEA).
The arctic could potentially alter the Earth's climate by becoming a possible source of global atmospheric carbon dioxide. The arctic now traps or absorbs up to 25 percent of this gas but climate change could alter that amount, according to a study published in the November issue of Ecological Monographs.
Rip currents—powerful, channeled currents of water flowing away from the shore—represent a danger to human life and property. Rip currents are responsible for more than one hundred deaths on our nation's beaches each year, according to the United States Lifesaving Association, and if rip currents persist long enough they can cause beach erosion. Henry Bokuniewicz, Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, and Ph.D.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University and other institutions have developed a new "plasmonic nanorod metamaterial" using extraordinarily tiny rods of gold that will have important applications in medical, biological and chemical sensors.
MADISON — The strikingly banded rocks scattered across the upper Midwest and elsewhere throughout the world are actually ambassadors from the past, offering clues to the environment of the early Earth more than 2 billion years ago.
Called banded iron formations or BIFs, these ancient rocks formed between 3.8 and 1.7 billion years ago at what was then the bottom of the ocean. The stripes represent alternating layers of silica-rich chert and iron-rich minerals like hematite and magnetite.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Oct. 9, 2009 -- For the first time, climate scientists from across the country have successfully incorporated the nitrogen cycle into global simulations for climate change, questioning previous assumptions regarding carbon feedback and potentially helping to refine model forecasts about global warming.
A new study by researchers at the University of Southampton has found that sea levels have been rising across the south coast of England over the past century, substantially increasing the risk of flooding during storms.
The team has conducted a major data collection exercise, bringing together computer and paper-based records from across the south of England, from the Scilly Isles to Sheerness, to form a single data set of south coast sea levels across the years.
Scientists at the University of York have uncovered the structure of an unusual enzyme which can be used to reverse the contamination of land by explosives.
The discovery, by scientists in the York Structural Biology Laboratory and the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products, will support the development of plants that can help tackle pollution caused by royal demolition explosive, also known as RDX.