Earth

BOULDER--Researchers have found that areas near commercial airports sometimes experience a small but measurable increase in rain and snow when aircraft take off and land under certain atmospheric conditions.

Ground-level ozone is an air pollutant that harms humans and plants. Both climate and weather play a major role in ozone damage to plants. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have now shown that climate change has the potential to significantly increase the risk of ozone damage to plants in northern and central Europe by the end of this century.

Puntarenas, Costa Rica – New samples of rock and sediment from the depths of the eastern Pacific Ocean may help explain the cause of large, destructive earthquakes similar to the Tohoku Earthquake that struck Japan in mid-March.

Nearly 1500 meters (almost one mile) of core collected from the ocean floor near the coast of Costa Rica reveal detailed records of approximately 2 million years of tectonic activity along a seismic plate boundary.

Panama City, Panama – Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 335 Superfast Spreading Rate Crust 4 recently completed operations in Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Hole 1256D, a deep scientific borehole that extends more than 1500 meters below the seafloor into the Pacific Ocean's igneous crust – rocks that formed through the cooling and crystallization of magma, and form the basement of the ocean floor.

Higher temperatures could significantly impact California and other premium winegrowing regions of the United States in the next 30 years, according to a new study led by Stanford University climate scientists.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- At the smallest scales, magnetism may not work quite the way scientists expected, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letters by Rafał Oszwałdowski and Igor Žutić of the University at Buffalo and Andre Petukhov of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

The three physicists have proposed that it would be possible to create a quantum dot -- a kind of nanoparticle -- that is magnetic under surprising circumstances.

Dennis Chesters of the NASA GOES Project noted of the animation, "The Chilean caldera still emits a steady stream of ash, three weeks after the initial eruption. Fortunately, the volume is much less, and the cold winter wind from the south carries it up the coast out over the Pacific, instead of over the Andes into Argentina."

A new database of plants' traits will help scientists around the world learn more about how climate change is affecting ecosystems.

The availability of plant trait data in the unified global database promises to support a paradigm shift in Earth system sciences.

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (June 29, 2011) – American artist Jackson Pollock's paintings often clashed with the rules of the art world. But they couldn't defy the laws of physics, according to a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Boston College and Harvard who give quantitative form to Pollock's methods and genius in the latest edition of the journal Physics Today.

Scientists who pioneered a revolutionary 3-D microscope technique are now describing an extension of that technology into a new dimension that promises sweeping applications in medicine, biological research, and development of new electronic devices. Their reports on so-called 4-D scanning ultrafast electron microscopy, and a related technique, appear in two papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

An emerging field of science termed "isoscapes" is making it possible to pinpoint the geographical origins of illegal drugs, trafficked endangered animals, dismembered human body parts at crime scenes, and even pricey scotch whiskey and cheese, according to an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the American Chemical Society's weekly newsmagazine.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – One-third of immigrant children and more than 70 percent of foreign-born, nonelderly adults living in New Jersey five years or less lack health coverage, a Rutgers statewide survey finds.

The report, "Health, Coverage and Access to Care of New Jersey Immigrants," by the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy (CSHP), also concludes immigrants face significant access-to-care barriers and their lack of health insurance is a much larger problem than for New Jerseyans born in the United States.

Honolulu, HI – Small scale convection at the base of the Pacific plate has been simulated in a model of mantle plume dynamics, enabling reasearchers to explain the complex set of observations at the Hawaiian hotspot, according to a new study posted online in the June 26th edition of Nature Geoscience. "A range of observations cannot be explained by the classical version of the mantle plume concept," says Maxim Ballmer, Post Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Geology and Geophysics in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UHM.

At a recent Kavli Futures Symposium, 19 experts from a diverse range of fields discussed the promise of using the lab to understand and exploit the evolution of organisms -- progress that may one day lead to new vaccines or other biotechnology products.

For Hollywood celebrities, the term "splitsville" usually means "check your prenup." For scientists wanting to mass-produce high quality nanoribbons from boron nitride nanotubes, "splitsville" could mean "happily ever after."