Earth

More than a decade ago, theorists predicted the possibility of a nanolens--a chain of three nanoscale spheres that would focus incoming light into a spot much smaller than possible with conventional microscopy. Such a device would make possible extremely high-resolution imaging or biological sensing. But scientists had been unable to build and arrange many nanolenses over a large area.

It has long been suspected that sulfur emissions can brighten clouds. Water droplets tend to clump around particles of sulfuric acid, causing smaller droplets that form brighter, more reflective clouds.

But while humans have pumped sulfur into Earth's atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, it's been hard to measure how this affects the clouds above. New University of Washington research uses a huge volcanic eruption in Iceland to measure the change.

An animation of satellite imagery over the course of 10 days shows a series of low pressure areas pummeling the Pacific Northwest. The video, created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland combined visible and infrared imagery from NOAA's GOES-West satellite.

The animation shows a series of storms buffeting the Pacific Northwestern U.S. from Nov. 29 to Dec. 9, 2015.

Boulder, Colo., The Marcellus Shale is famous as a formation being explored for natural gas resources. That exploration has also offered some insight into an age-old problem: where was the continent of North America 400 million years ago?

In a research partnership between Lehigh University and The Pennsylvania State University, subterranean rock samples have been used to help fill a gap in the history of Earth's magnetic field, and, as a corollary, places some constraints on the position of North America when the Marcellus Formation was deposited.

Boulder, Colo., USA - The faulted alluvial fans near Badwater in Death Valley are amongst the most visited and classic landforms in the U.S. New mapping and dating of these landforms, presented in this open-access study by Kurt Frankel and colleagues, help to determine the timing of past earthquakes and how tectonic deformation is distributed across the western U.S. This in turn provides important data for seismic hazard mitigation and for understanding how the great landscapes of the western U.S. have evolved over recent geologic time.

BOULDER - Climate scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) present evidence in a new study that they can predict whether the Arctic sea ice that forms in the winter will grow, shrink, or hold its own over the next several years.

The team of scientists has found that changes in the North Atlantic ocean circulation could allow overall winter sea ice extent to remain steady in the near future, with continued loss in some regions balanced by possible growth in others, including in the Barents Sea.

For years, many scientists thought we had a secret weapon to protect coral reefs from nutrients flushed into the seas by human activity. Experiments suggested that herbivores such as fish, urchins and sea turtles could keep corals and their ecosystems healthy by eating up extra algae that grew in the presence of these nutrients. But a new University of Florida study sheds doubt on that idea, underscoring the importance of sustainable growth in coastal areas.