Boulder, CO, USA – Understanding Earth's paleo-hurricane record cannot be more timely and important in a light of Hurricane Sandy, which shocked the U.S. East Coast last week. Talks in this Wednesday afternoon session at the GSA Annual Meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, integrate field, lab, and model analysis of past hurricanes and future scenarios, covering a wide range of temporal and spatial scales.
Earth
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Rapid advances in the new and developing field of restoration sedimentology will be needed to protect the world's river deltas from an array of threats, Indiana University Bloomington geologist Douglas A. Edmonds writes in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The commentary, published this week in the November issue, addresses the fact that land is disappearing from river deltas at alarming rates. And deltas are extraordinarily important: They are ecologically rich and productive, and they are home to about 10 percent of the world's population.
ANN ARBOR—The fossilized fangs of saber-toothed cats hold clues to how the extinct mammals shared space and food with other large predators 9 million years ago.
Led by the University of Michigan and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, a team of paleontologists has analyzed the tooth enamel of two species of saber-toothed cats and a bear dog unearthed in geological pits near Madrid. Bear dogs, also extinct, had dog-like teeth and a bear-like body and gait.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Specialty stores do not have to compete with supermarket prices to increase sales, according to a recent study from the University at Buffalo School of Management.
Researchers found that consumers are not concerned about higher prices when shopping at specialty stores, and that they are more likely to buy items related to their main purchase than at a supermarket.
To build the computer chips of the future, designers will need to understand how an electrical charge behaves when it is confined to metal wires only a few atom-widths in diameter.
Now, a team of physicists at McGill University, in collaboration with researchers at General Motors R&D, have shown that electrical current may be drastically reduced when wires from two dissimilar metals meet. The surprisingly sharp reduction in current reveals a significant challenge that could shape material choices and device design in the emerging field of nanoelectronics.
If you look old, your heart may feel old, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2012.
In a new study, those who had three to four aging signs — receding hairline at the temples, baldness at the head's crown, earlobe crease, or yellow fatty deposits around the eyelid (xanthelasmata) — had a 57 percent increased risk for heart attack and a 39 percent increased risk for heart disease.
Boulder, CO, USA – Climate change and extreme weather events grab the headlines, but there is another, lesser known, global change underway on land, in the seas, and in the air: acidification.
It turns out that combustion of fossil fuels, smelting of ores, mining of coal and metal ores, and application of nitrogen fertilizer to soils are all driving down the pH of the air, water, and the soil at rates far faster than Earth's natural systems can buffer, posing threats to both land and sea life.
The 2011 Mineral, Virginia M-5.8 earthquake was felt over an extraordinarily large area. A new study details landslides triggered by the earthquake at distances four times greater and over an area 20 times larger than previously documented for M-5.8 earthquakes worldwide.
The study, to be published in the December issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), describes physical confirmation of previous observations that ground shaking from earthquakes in the eastern U.S. travels farther than in the western U.S, a plate-boundary region.
Global warming could cause frequent and severe failures of the Indian summer monsoon in the next two centuries, new research suggests.
The effects of these unprecedented changes would be extremely detrimental to India's economy which relies heavily on the monsoon season to bring fresh water to the farmlands.
The findings have been published today, 6 November, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Potsdam University.
AMHERST, Mass. – For more than 30 years, climate scientists have debated whether flood waters from melting of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet, which ushered in the last major cold episode on Earth about 12,900 years ago, flowed northwest into the Arctic first, or east via the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to weaken ocean thermohaline circulation and have a frigid effect on global climate.
Nowadays, electron microscopes are an essential tool, especially in the field of materials science. At TU Vienna, electron beams are being created that possess an inner rotation, similarly to a tornado. These "vortex beams" cannot only be used to display objects, but to investigate material-specific properties - with precision on a nanometer scale. A new breakthrough in research now allows scientists to produce much more intense vortex beams than ever before.
Quantum Tornado: the Electron as a Wave
The largest volcanic eruption on Earth in the past millions of years took place in Indonesia 74,000 years ago and researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute can now link the colossal eruption with the global climate and the effects on early humans. The results are published in the scientific journal Climate of the Past.
Washington, D.C.--Researchers at the Carnegie Institution have discovered a new efficient way to pump heat using crystals. The crystals can pump or extract heat, even on the nanoscale, so they could be used on computer chips to prevent overheating or even meltdown, which is currently a major limit to higher computer speeds. The research is published in the Physical Review Letters.
Boulder, CO, USA – Not very long ago a professional geologist's field kit consisted of a Brunton compass, rock hammer, magnifying glass, and field notebook. No longer. In the field and in the labs and classrooms, studying Earth has undergone an explosive change in recent years, fueled by technological leaps in handheld digital devices, especially tablet computers and cameras.
Boulder, CO, USA – More than a dozen papers to be presented next week at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in North Carolina touch on aspects of uranium mining, environmental contamination, leakage, sorption, geochemistry, and mineral dating. Two studies focus on the Coles Hill uranium deposit in nearby Chatham, Virginia. Another discusses environmental contamination near a uranium mine, while a fourth focusses on potential nuclear repository conditions.
The following highlighted papers will be presented on Sunday and Monday at the Charlotte Convention Center.