Earth

Climate change disasters, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, dieback of the Amazon rainforest or collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation, could be predicted according to University of Exeter research.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Professor Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter say that the 'tipping points' that trigger these disasters could be anticipated by looking for changes in climate behaviour.

Fluctuations in climate can drastically affect the habitability of marine ecosystems, according to a new study by UCLA scientists that examined the expansion and contraction of low-oxygen zones in the ocean.

College Park, MD (June 17, 2011)--A team of researchers has proposed a way to turn the material graphene into a semiconductor, enabling it to control the flow of electrons with a laser "on-off switch".

A multicenter pilot study of etanercept for treatment of dermatomyositis found no major safety concerns and many patients treated with the drug were successfully weaned from steroid therapy. These results are encouraging, but larger studies are needed to further investigate the safety and efficacy of etanercept. Results of this clinical trial are available in Annals of Neurology, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Neurological Association.

It's summer wildflower season in the Rocky Mountains, a time when high-peaks meadows are dotted with riotous color.

But for how long?

Once, wildflower season in montane meadow ecosystems extended throughout the summer months. But now scientists have found a fall-off in wildflowers at mid-season.

They published their results, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), in the current issue of the Journal of Ecology.

BATON ROUGE – LSU Department of Physics Professors Thomas Kutter and Martin Tzanov, and Professor Emeritus William Metcalf, along with graduate and undergraduate students, have been working for several years on an experiment in Japan called T2K, or Tokai to Kamioka Long Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiment, which studies the most elusive of fundamental subatomic particles – the neutrino. The team announced they have an indication of a new type of neutrino transformation or oscillation from a muon neutrino to an electron neutrino.

Washington, D.C.—Glasses differ from crystals; crystals are organized in repeating patterns that extend in every direction and glasses lack this strict organization, but do sometimes demonstrate order among neighboring atoms.

New research from Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory reveals the possibility of creating a metallic glass that is organized on a larger scale.

Menlo Park, CA.--Glass, by definition, is amorphous; its atoms lack order and are arranged every which way. But when scientists squeezed tiny samples of a metallic glass under high pressure, they got a surprise: The atoms lined up in a regular pattern to form a single crystal.

An international research team may have taken a significant step in discovering why matter trumped antimatter at the time of Big Bang, helping to create virtually all of the galaxies and stars in the universe.

The experiment, known as the Tokai to Kamioka experiment (T2K), included shooting a beam of neutrinos underground from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, or J-PARC, on the country's east coast to a detector near Japan's west coast, a distance of about 185 miles.

EDMONTON (National Access & Privacy Conference 2011) – June 16, 2011 – Canadian privacy experts have issued a new report (link will go live after embargo lift) today that strongly backs the practice of de-identification as a key element in the protection of personal information. The joint paper from Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, and Dr.

Since its eruption in early June, several NASA satellites have captured images of the ash plume from the eruption of the Chilean Volcano called Puyehue-Cordón Caulle and have tracked it around the world. NASA has collected them in the NASA Goddard FLICKR image gallery that shows the progression of the plume around the southern hemisphere.

The Puyehue-Cordón Caulle Volcanic Complex includes the Puyehue volcano, the Cordón Caulle rift zone and the Cordillera Nevada caldera.

A new survey of barrier islands published earlier this spring offers the most thorough assessment to date of the thousands of small islands that hug the coasts of the world's landmasses. The study, led by Matthew Stutz of Meredith College, Raleigh, N.C., and Orrin Pilkey of Duke University, Durham, N.C., offers new insight into how the islands form and evolve over time – and how they may fare as the climate changes and sea level rises.

The international T2K collaboration announced today that they have observed an indication of a new type of neutrino transformation or oscillation from a muon neutrino to an electron neutrino. Boston University Professor of Physics Edward Kearns is among the team of researchers responsible for this discovery.

Using sophisticated methods of dating rocks, a team including University of Southampton researchers based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, have pinned down the timing of the start of an episode of an ancient global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), with implications for the triggering mechanism.