Earth

FORT COLLINS, COLO. - Imagine being able to instantly diagnose diabetes, Ebola or some other disease, simply by watching how a droplet of blood moves on a surface.

That's just one potential impact of new research led by Arun Kota, assistant professor in Colorado State University's Department of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering. Kota's lab makes coatings that repel not just water, but virtually any liquid, including oils and acids - a property called superomniphobicity.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In the world of quantum, infinitesimally small particles, weird and often logic-defying behaviors abound. Perhaps the strangest of these is the idea of superposition, in which objects can exist simultaneously in two or more seemingly counterintuitive states. For example, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, electrons may spin both clockwise and counter-clockwise, or be both at rest and excited, at the same time.

Every day, modern society creates more than a billion gigabytes of new data. To store all this data, it is increasingly important that each single bit occupies as little space as possible. A team of scientists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University managed to bring this reduction to the ultimate limit: they built a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom. "In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp", says lead-scientist Sander Otte.

The Rio Grande (called Rio Bravo in Mexico) is the lifeline to an expansive desert in the southwest USA and northern Mexico. From Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, over 3000 km, people depend on the river to quench their thirst and irrigate their crops. The river also forms the boundary between the USA and Mexico for 2034 km.

An electron microscope can't just snap a photo like a mobile phone camera can. The ability of an electron microscope to image a structure - and how successful this imaging will be - depends on how well you understand the structure. Complex physics calculations are often needed to make full use of the potential of electron microscopy. An international research team led by TU Wien's Prof. Peter Schattschneider set out to analyse the opportunities offered by EFTEM, that is energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy.

18.07.2016 | Present-day continents were shaped hundreds of millions of years ago as the supercontinent Pangaea broke apart. Derived from Pangaea's main fragments Gondwana and Laurasia, the current continents move at speeds of 20 to 80 millimeters per year characterizing today's plate tectonics.

Hospital admissions for a short-term and avoidable complication of diabetes have risen by 39 per cent in the last ten years, a new analysis has concluded.

Almost 80,000 people were admitted to hospital in England for hypoglycaemia -- where the blood sugar of a person with diabetes drops to dangerously low levels -- for a total of 101,475 episodes between 2005 and 2014, an NIHR-supported study carried out at the Leicester Diabetes Centre found.

Until quite recently, creating a hologram of a single photon was believed to be impossible due to fundamental laws of physics. However, scientists at the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, have successfully applied concepts of classical holography to the world of quantum phenomena. A new measurement technique has enabled them to register the first ever hologram of a single light particle, thereby shedding new light on the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Tropical Storm Estelle continues to strengthen in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and NASA satellite imagery showed what appears to be a developing eye in the storm.

On July 17 at 09:30 UTC (5:30 a.m. EDT), the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of Tropical Storm Estelle. The VIIRS image showed the hint of a cloud-covered eye in Estelle surrounded by a ring of powerful thunderstorms. The Suomi NPP satellite is managed by NASA and NOAA with support from the U.S. Department of Defense.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (http://www.ucr.edu) -- Preparation and good timing enabled Gareth Funning and a team of researchers to collect a unique data set following the 2014 South Napa earthquake that showed different parts of the fault, sometimes only a few kilometers apart, moved at different speeds and at different times.

Alexandria, VA - Smith, Steno and Wegener, among many others, are familiar names to any geoscientist. In their times, these scientists reshaped contemporary understanding of geology and paved the way for the field we know today. But it is not just the theories they articulated that greatly impacted the future of the discipline.

Tropical Cyclone Celia weakened to a remnant low pressure area. NOAA's GOES-West satellite provided an infrared look at the clouds associated with the low.

GOES-West captured an infrared image of Celia's remnant clouds at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT). The image showed an open circulation with the bulk of clouds to the northeast of the low-level center. NOAA manages the GOES series of satellites, and the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland uses the data to create images and animations.

Boulder, Colo., USA - A team of international scientists from China, France, Scotland, United States and led by Canadian Professors Nigel Blamey and Uwe Brand of Brock University in southern Ontario made a scientific breakthrough by measuring the oxygen content of Earth's ancient atmosphere. They discovered that gases trapped by halite (rock salt) during crystallization may contain atmospheric gases, among them oxygen.

LOGAN, UTAH, USA - By developing an innovative series of mathematical equations, Utah State University ecologists are shedding light on a stalemate that's vexed population biologists' understanding of why some organisms adapt and flourish, while others decline.

A new hypothesis on the extinction of dinosaurs and ammonites at the end of the Cretaceous Period has been proposed by a research team from Tohoku University and the Japan Meteorological Agency's Meteorological Research Institute.

The researchers believe that massive amounts of stratospheric soot ejected from rocks following the famous Chicxulub asteroid impact, caused global cooling, drought and limited cessation of photosynthesis in oceans. This, they say, could have been the process that led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs and ammonites.