Washington, D.C.—Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. The way it responds under extreme pressures and temperatures is crucial to our understanding of matter and the nature of hydrogen-rich planets.
New work from Carnegie scientists using intense infrared radiation shines new light on this fundamental material at extreme pressures and reveals the details of a surprising new form of solid hydrogen.
It is obvious from the data of the KASCADE-Grande experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) that the so-called "knee" of the cosmic rays, a bend in the energy spectrum at high energies, is located at different energies for light and heavy particles. As regards light particles, the scientists have now found that the energy spectrum flattens again beyond the knee and forms a type of "ankle". This structure indicates that cosmic radiation particles with energies beyond the knee are accelerated in galaxies other than the Milky Way.
In a bid to save £10 million a year the British Treasury is replacing copper–nickel five and ten pence coins with new nickel-plated steel versions. However, while no UK health assessment has taken place, scientists in Sweden have analyzed the allergy risk after the Swedish state bank announced it will reduce traces of nickel in Swedish coinage.
New Zealand's geologic hazards agency reported this week an ongoing, "silent" earthquake that began in January is still going strong. Though it is releasing the energy equivalent of a 7.0 earthquake, New Zealanders can't feel it because its energy is being released over a long period of time, therefore slow, rather than a few short seconds.
More time in front of the TV set and higher exposure to TV adverts may lead to increased consumption of sweetened beverages among children. This is the conclusion of a new study from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
The parents of more than 1,700 two- to four-year-olds in Sweden responded to questions about their children's TV and screen habits and consumption of sweetened drinks.
Some research has shown that the effects of changes in the climate may be weak or even non-existent. This makes it easy to conclude that climate change will ultimately have less impact than previous warnings have predicted. But it could also be explained as direct and indirect effects cancelling each other out, as scientists from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, show in a paper recently published in PNAS, the esteemed US scientific journal.
To investigate how different climate impacts interact, an experiment was conducted at Kristineberg Marine Research Station.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – As ice sheets melted during the deglaciation of the last ice age and global oceans warmed, oceanic oxygen levels decreased and "denitrification" accelerated by 30 to 120 percent, a new international study shows, creating oxygen-poor marine regions and throwing the oceanic nitrogen cycle off balance.
A major question in ecology has centered on the role of microbes in regulating ecosystem function. Now, in research published ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Brajesh Singh of the University of Western Sydney, Australia, and collaborators show how changes in the populations of methanotrophic bacteria can have consequences for methane mitigation at ecosystem levels.
"Ecological theories developed for macro-ecology can explain the microbial regulation of the methane cycle," says Singh.
Using the sensitive ears of a parasitic fly for inspiration, a group of researchers has created a new type of microphone that achieves better acoustical performance than what is currently available in hearing aids. The scientists will present their results at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics, held June 2-7 in Montreal.
The ocean is naturally filled with the sounds of breaking waves, cracking ice, driving rain, and marine animal calls, but more and more, human activity is adding to the noise. Ships' propellers create low-frequency hums that can travel hundreds of kilometers or more in the deep ocean. Scientists have now modeled this shipping noise on a global scale. The world-wide maps will be presented for the first time at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal.
During command and control operations, military personnel are frequently exposed to extreme auditory overload – essentially bombarded by multiple messages coming from radio networks, loudspeakers, and live voices in an environment also filled with high-level noise from weapons and vehicles.
Of all the bugs that achieve the mantle of summer pest, cicadas are perhaps the most curious. They don't sting, they don't bite, they don't buzz around your head, they taste good in chocolate, but as the drowning din of the 17-year brood this summer will remind: we would love them less if they emerged more often.
Cicadas are unique among insects in their ability to emit loud and annoying sounds. So why would anyone actually want to replicate theses sounds?
New York, NY—May 31, 2013—In a new study, published in Science May 31, 2013, Columbia Engineering researchers demonstrate that graphene, even if stitched together from many small crystalline grains, is almost as strong as graphene in its perfect crystalline form. This work resolves a contradiction between theoretical simulations, which predicted that grain boundaries can be strong, and earlier experiments, which indicated that they were much weaker than the perfect lattice.
Researchers have determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV capsid, a protein shell that protects the virus's genetic material and is a key to its ability to infect and debilitate the human body's defense mechanism. Detailed simulations were achieved with the use of a supercomputer on a 64 million atom sample. The capsid has become an attractive target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs that suppress the HIV virus and stop the progression of AIDS.
Taking an image of an individual molecule while it undergoes a chemical reaction has been deemed one of the holy grails of chemistry. Scientists at the University of Berkeley and the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) have managed, for the very first time, to take direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules just before and immediately after a complex organic reaction. The images enable appreciating the processes of the rupture and creation of links between the atoms making up a molecule.