What came first: the bipedal human ancestor or the grassland encroaching on the forest?
A new analysis of the past 12 million years' of vegetation change in the cradle of humanity is challenging long-held beliefs about the world in which our ancestors took shape – and, by extension, the impact it had on them.
It would be a terrible thing if laboratories striving to grow graphene from carbon atoms kept winding up with big pesky diamonds.
"That would be trouble, cleaning out the diamonds so you could do some real work," said Rice University theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson, chuckling at the absurd image.
The research of a multi-institutional team from the U.S., Japan, and France, led by Predrag S. Krstic of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences and Jean Paul Allain of Purdue University has answered the question of how the behavior of plasma—the extremely hot gases of nuclear fusion—can be controlled with ultra-thin lithium films on graphite walls lining thermonuclear magnetic fusion devices.
"It is remarkable that seemingly insignificant lithium depositions can profoundly influence the behavior of something as powerful as fusion plasmas," Krstic said.
It came out of Siberia, swirling winds over an area that covered almost the entire Arctic basin in the normally calm late summer. It came to be known as "The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012," and for some observers it suggested that the historic sea ice minimum may have been caused by a freak summer storm, rather than warming temperatures.
The rate of chemical processes in cells is dictated by the speed of movement (diffusion) of molecules needed for a given reaction. Using a versatile method developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, researchers were able to predict for the first time the diffusion coefficients of all proteins in Escherichia coli. The achievement is important not only for biologists and chemists, but also for... transport companies.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Rebutting a speculative hypothesis that comet explosions changed Earth's climate sufficiently to end the Clovis culture in North America about 13,000 years ago, Sandia lead author Mark Boslough and researchers from 14 academic institutions assert that other explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance.
"There's no plausible mechanism to get airbursts over an entire continent," said Boslough, a physicist. "For this and other reasons, we conclude that the impact hypothesis is, unfortunately, bogus."
ANN ARBOR--- Young adults in Generation X are as likely to connect with friends, family and co-workers online as they are in person, according to a University of Michigan study.
In a typical month, adults in their late 30s report that they engaged in about 75 face-to-face contacts or conversations, compared to about 74 electronic contracts through personal emails or social media.
In this month's edition of Physics World, science writer Richard Corfield casts doubt on the alleged "brainwashing" of the late British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell by the Soviets at the height of the Cold War and explains how his trips beyond the Iron Curtain laid the foundations for the easing of geopolitical tensions between the UK and the USSR.
Speaking to Lovell's son Bryan, Corfield reveals a more mundane explanation for why Lovell, who founded the Jodrell Bank telescope in the UK, fell ill on his return from the USSR in 1963.
Homing pigeons are usually remarkably efficient navigators, however, on rare occasions, things go drastically wrong. So, when Jon Hagstrum of the US Geological Survey read in his local newspaper about two races when pigeons had been lost in 1998, he was reminded of a lecture by Bill Keeton that he had heard years before as an undergraduate at Cornell University. Keeton had been studying how birds successfully navigated from distant and unfamiliar release sites. However, the birds almost always had problems selecting the correct bearing home when released from three local sites.
A powerful cold front moving from the central United States to the East Coast is wiping out spring-like temperatures and replacing them with winter-time temperatures with powerful storms in between. An image released from NASA using data from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provides a stunning look at the powerful system that brings a return to winter weather in its wake.
False-colored night-time satellite imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite clearly shows bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the eye of Cyclone Felleng as it parallels the coast of eastern Madagascar.
Two Rutgers physics professors have proposed an explanation for a new type of order, or symmetry, in an exotic material made with uranium – a theory that may one day lead to enhanced computer displays and data storage systems and more powerful superconducting magnets for medical imaging and levitating high-speed trains.
Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the February 2013 issue of GSA Today, Sean Gallen and his colleagues from the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University take a new look at the origin of the Miocene rejuvenation of topographic relief in the southern Appalachians.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have created, for the first time, a new type of microchip which allows information to travel in three dimensions. Currently, microchips can only pass digital information in a very limited way - from either left to right or front to back. The research was published today, 31 January, in Nature.
Dr Reinoud Lavrijsen, an author on the paper from the University of Cambridge, said: "Today's chips are like bungalows – everything happens on the same floor. We've created the stairways allowing information to pass between floors."
Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as Clovis, in North America 13,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series.