Earth

Black carbon is the second largest man-made contributor to global warming and its influence on climate has been greatly underestimated, according to the first quantitative and comprehensive analysis of this issue.

A research team involving several scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder has found an unexpected silver lining in the devastating pine beetle outbreaks ravaging the West: Such events do not harm water quality in adjacent streams as scientists had previously believed.

The climate changes depicted by climatologists up to the year 2080 will benefit most mammals that live in northern Europe's Arctic and sub-Arctic land areas today if they are able to reach their new climatic ranges. This is the conclusion drawn by ecologists at Umeå University in a recently published article in the journal Plos ONE.

Archaeologists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have discovered a cluster of 12 unusual stones in the back of a small, prehistoric rock-shelter near the town of Boquete. The cache represents the earliest material evidence of shamanistic practice in lower Central America.

Seabird activity is contributing significantly to methane and nitrous oxide emissions in the Arctic tundra, a new study shows. Methane emissions, which play an important role in the global carbon cycle, and nitrous oxide fluxes, a key element in the nutrient cycle, are predicted to increase in the Arctic and contribute to Arctic warming in the near future.

Too much noise causes illness. This is as an undisputed fact nowadays, and yet we're still constantly assailed by noise as we go about our daily lives, be it from traffic or voices in large open-plan offices. Noise pollution can be reduced with the help of structural solutions; we've all seen noise barriers along busy roads and train lines, and there are special acoustic structural components, so-called sound absorbers, which are used inside buildings to keep noise levels down. But there's a problem.

Amino acids in orange juice might reveal secrets to the successful attack strategy of the plant pathogen that causes citrus greening disease, also known as Huanglongbing or HLB. Studies of these amino acids by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) chemist Andrew P. Breksa III and University of California-Davis professor Carolyn M. Slupsky may pave the way to a safe, effective, environmentally friendly approach to undermine Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus, the microbial culprit behind HLB.

It was cosmology that drew Irene Sendra from Valencia to the Basque Country. Cosmology alsogave her the chance to collaborate with one of the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics on one of the darkest areas of the universe. And dark matter and dark energy, well-known precisely because so little is known about them, are in fact the object of the study bySendra, a researcher in the Department of Theoretical Physics and History of Science of the UPV/EHU's Faculty of Science and Technology.

Monthly temperature extremes have become much more frequent, as measurements from around the world indicate. On average, there are now five times as many record-breaking hot months worldwide than could be expected without long-term global warming, shows a study now published in Climatic Change. In parts of Europe, Africa and southern Asia the number of monthly records has increased even by a factor of ten.

Scientists at the Universities of York and Leeds have made a significant discovery about the cause of the destruction of ozone over oceans.

They have established that the majority of ozone-depleting iodine oxide observed over the remote ocean comes from a previously unknown marine source.The research team found that the principal source of iodine oxide can be explained by emissions of hypoiodous acid (HOI) – a gas not yet considered as being released from the ocean – along with a contribution from molecular iodine (I2).

Scientists at the Universities of York and Leeds have made a significant discovery about the cause of the destruction of ozone over oceans.

They have established that the majority of ozone-depleting iodine oxide observed over the remote ocean comes from a previously unknown marine source.The research team found that the principal source of iodine oxide can be explained by emissions of hypoiodous acid (HOI) – a gas not yet considered as being released from the ocean – along with a contribution from molecular iodine (I2).

Ever since he was a kid growing up in Germany, Holger Müller has been asking himself a fundamental question: What is time?

That question has now led Müller, today an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, to a fundamentally new way of measuring time.

Taking advantage of the fact that, in nature, matter can be both a particle and a wave, he has discovered a way to tell time by counting the oscillations of a matter wave. A matter wave's frequency is 10 billion times higher than that of visible light.

ATHENS, Ohio (Jan. 10, 2013)—An international team of scientists has taken the next step in creating nanoscale machines by designing a multi-component molecular motor that can be moved clockwise and counterclockwise.Although researchers can rotate or switch individual molecules on and off, the new study is the first to create a stand-alone molecular motor that has multiple parts, said Saw-Wai Hla, an Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy who led the study with Christian Joachim of A*Star in Singapore and CEMES/CNRS in France and Gwenael Rapenne of CEMES/CNRS.

The Mathematical Sciences in 2025, a new report from the National Research Council, finds that the mathematical sciences are an increasingly integral component of many disciplines -- including biology, medicine, the social sciences, business, advanced design, and climate studies. However, the expanding role of the mathematical sciences over the past 15 years has not been matched by a comparable increase in federal funding, and the number of federal agencies that provide significant support for this research is considerably smaller than the number that profit from it.

Royal Holloway is among a select group of top universities to receive £21.5 million in government funding to explore commercial uses for graphene.

Announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne just after Christmas, the funding will focus attention on the so-called 'super-material' graphene, one of the thinnest, strongest and most conductive materials known to man.