This is a joint press release from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
Limiting climate change to target levels will become much more difficult to achieve, and more expensive, if action is not taken soon, according to a new analysis from IIASA, ETH Zurich, and NCAR.
Intense but small-scale polar storms could make a big difference to climate predictions according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the University of Massachusetts.
Difficult-to-forecast polar mesoscale storms occur frequently over the polar seas, however they are missing in most climate models.
Research published today in Nature Geoscience shows that their inclusion could paint a different picture of climate change in years to come.
Physicists at the University of Calgary and at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo have published new research in Nature Physics which builds on the original ideas of Einstein and adds a new ingredient: a third entangled particle.
HOUSTON – (Dec. 14, 2012) – A new material structure predicted at Rice University offers the tantalizing possibility of a signal path smaller than the nanowires for advanced electronics now under development at Rice and elsewhere.
Theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and postdoctoral fellow Xiaolong Zou were investigating the atomic-scale properties of two-dimensional materials when they found to their surprise that a particular formation, a grain boundary in metal disulfides, creates a metallic – and therefore conducting – path only a fraction of a nanometer wide.
The mass ratio of protons and electrons is deemed to be a universal constant. And rightly so, as the latest radio-astronomy observations of a distant galaxy have shown. Scientists at the VU University of Amsterdam and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn used the 100-metre radio telescope in Effelsberg to measure absorption lines of the methanol molecule at a number of characteristic frequencies. The researchers analysed the spectrum of the simplest of all the alcohols in a very distant galaxy.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– While some theoretical physicists make predictions about astrophysics and the behavior of stars and galaxies, others work in the realm of the very small, which includes quantum physics. Such is the case at UC Santa Barbara, where theoretical physicists at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) cover the range of questions in physics.
ARLINGTON, Va.—The Navy's chief of naval research, Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, met this week with leaders from U.S. and Canadian government agencies to address research efforts in the Arctic, in response to dramatic and accelerating changes in summer sea ice coverage.
Prostate cancer patients receiving the costly treatment known as proton radiotherapy experienced minimal relief from side effects such as incontinence and erectile dysfunction, compared to patients undergoing a standard radiation treatment called intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), Yale School of Medicine researchers report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
HOUSTON – (Dec. 13, 2012) – Since Edison's first bulb, heat has been a mostly undesirable byproduct of light. Now researchers at Rice University are turning light into heat at the point of need, on the nanoscale, to trigger biochemical reactions remotely on demand.
The method created by the Rice labs of Michael Wong, Ramon Gonzalez and Naomi Halas and reported today in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano makes use of materials derived from unique microbes – thermophiles – that thrive at high temperatures but shut down at room temperature.
Washington, D.C. — When materials are stressed, they eventually change shape. Initially these changes are elastic, and reverse when the stress is relieved. When the material's strength is exceeded, the changes become permanent. This could result in the material breaking or shattering, but it could also re-shape the material, such as a hammer denting a piece of metal. Understanding this last group of changes is the focus of research from a team including Carnegie's Ho-kwang "Dave" Mao.
The insurance industry, the world's largest business with $4.6 trillion in revenues, is making larger efforts to manage climate change-related risks, according to a new study published today in the journal Science.
A research group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a relatively simple, fast and effective method of depositing uniform, ultrathin layers of platinum atoms on a surface.* The new process exploits an unexpected feature of electrodeposition of platinum—if you drive the reaction much more strongly than usual, a new reaction steps in to shuts down the metal deposition process, allowing an unprecedented level of control of the film thickness.
WASHINGTON, Dec.
How many matter particles exist in nature? Particle physicists have been dealing with this question for a long time. The 12 matter particles contained in the standard model of particle physics? Or are there further particles with too high a mass to be produced by the experiments performed so far? These questions are now answered by researchers of KIT, CERN, and Humboldt University in the current issue of the Physical Review Letters. (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.241802)
Scientists have developed a new method for studying parasite numbers in the stomachs of individual seabirds in the wild. The technique enables the recording of video footage of worms inside seabird stomachs and is an important step forward in understanding the impact of parasites on seabird populations. The research is published today (13 December 2012) in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.