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SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 5, 2009 – University of Utah chemists demonstrated the first conclusive link between the size of catalyst particles on a solid surface, their electronic properties and their ability to speed chemical reactions. The study is a step toward the goal of designing cheaper, more efficient catalysts to increase energy production, reduce Earth-warming gases and manufacture a wide variety of goods from medicines to gasoline.

The Alps are growing just as quickly in height, as they are shrinking. This paradoxical result could be proven by a group of German and Swiss geoscientists. Due to glaciers and rivers about exactly the same amount of material is eroded from the Alp slopes as is regenerated from the deep Earth's crust. The climatic cycles of the glacial period in Europe over the past 2.5 million years have accelerated this erosion process. In the latest volume of the science magazine "Tectonophysics" ( No.

Community-based education and awareness programs minimized the death toll from the recent Samoan tsunami, though there are still ways to improve the warning and evacuation process, according to a team of researchers that traveled to Samoa last month.

The team, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, collected data Oct. 4 through Oct. 11 to document the impacts of the 8.1 earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that occurred on Sept. 29. They examined flow depths, run-up heights, inundation distances, sediment depositions and damage patterns at various scales.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Physicists at Harvard University have created a quantum gas microscope that can be used to observe single atoms at temperatures so low the particles follow the rules of quantum mechanics, behaving in bizarre ways.

The work, published this week in the journal Nature, represents the first time scientists have detected single atoms in a crystalline structure made solely of light, called a Bose Hubbard optical lattice. It's part of scientists' efforts to use ultracold quantum gases to understand and develop novel quantum materials.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard materials scientists have come up with what they believe is a new way to model the formation of glasses, a type of amorphous solid that includes common window glass.

Glasses form through the process of vitrification, in which a glass-forming liquid cools and slowly becomes a solid whose molecules, though they've stopped moving, are not permanently locked into a crystal structure. Instead, they're more like a liquid that has merely stopped flowing, though they can continue to move over long stretches of time.

A theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a method for calculating the motions and forces of thousands of atoms simultaneously over a wider range of time scales than previously possible. The method overcomes a longstanding timing gap in modeling nanometer-scale materials and many other physical, chemical and biological systems at atomic and molecular levels.

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