Earth

Air pollution from Asia has been rising for several decades but Hawaii had seemed to escape the ozone pollution that drifts east with the springtime winds. Now a team of researchers has found that shifts in atmospheric circulation explain the trends in Hawaiian ozone pollution.

Boulder, Colo., USA – Learn more about river morphology in Oregon; coastal responses to sea level; the Tertiary Sabzevar Range, Iran; carbon-dioxide sequestration; fault systems in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica; Villarrica Volcano, Chile; landslide modeling; the southern Bighorn Arch, Wyoming; high-diversity plant fossil assemblages of the Salamanca Formation, Argentina; Upper Cretaceous strata, Western Interior Seaway; stratigraphy in Italy; the Soreq drainage, Israel; faulting in Surprise Valley, California; and the Qiantang River estuary, eastern China.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Jan. 27, 2014 – Nearly 30 years after the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, many questions remain, but an Oak Ridge National Laboratory team is providing insight that could lead to better superconductors.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2014 — After several years and millions of views, the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, is bidding farewell to its popular YouTube series Bytesize Science. But you can't keep a great chemistry video series down for long.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University have shown experimentally that a boron-based competitor to graphene is a very real possibility.

"I didn't see it, because I wasn't expecting it there," might be the more accurate excuse for motorists who have just crashed into a bus or a motorcycle. The mere fact that such vehicles are less common than cars on our roads actually makes it harder for drivers to notice them, says Vanessa Beanland of The Australian National University. Beanland and colleagues conducted research at Monash University on how the so-called "low-prevalence effect" increases the likelihood of accidents. The study is published in Springer's journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

New types of solotronic structures, including the world's first quantum dots containing single cobalt ions, have been created and studied at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw. The materials and elements used to form these structures allow us forecast new trends in solotronics – a field of experimental electronics and spintronics of the future, based on operations occurring on a single-atom level.

An article entitled "Geologic characteristics of the Chang'E-3 exploration region"was published online for SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy on January 21, 2014. It presents some new results on the geologic characteristics of the Chang'E-3 exploration region.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from the Earth's oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought.

Seismologists at Liverpool have estimated that over the age of the Earth, the Japan subduction zone alone could transport the equivalent of up to three and a half times the water of all the Earth's oceans to its mantle.

University researchers from two continents have engineered an efficient and environmentally friendly catalyst for the production of molecular hydrogen (H2), a compound used extensively in modern industry to manufacture fertilizer and refine crude oil into gasoline.

The tropical carbon cycle has become twice as sensitive to temperature variations over the past 50 years, new research has revealed.

The research shows that a one degree rise in tropical temperature leads to around two billion extra tonnes of carbon being released per year into the atmosphere from tropical ecosystems, compared with the same tropical warming in the 1960s and 1970s.

New research from Queen's University Belfast shows that the tropical forests of South East Asia have been shaped by humans for the last 11,000 years.

The rain forests of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Thailand and Vietnam were previously thought to have been largely unaffected by humans, but the latest research from Queen's Palaeoecologist Dr Chris Hunt suggests otherwise.

In common perception, carbon dioxide is just a greenhouse gas, one of the major environmental problems of mankind. For Warsaw chemists CO2 became, however, something else: a key element of reactions allowing for creation of nanomaterials with unprecedented properties.

Dogs' paths during group walks could be used to determine leadership roles and through that their social ranks and personality traits, according to research published in PLOS Computational Biology this week.

Using high-resolution GPS harnesses, researchers from Oxford University, Eötvös University, Budapest and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) tracked the movements of six dogs and their owner across fourteen 30-40 minute walks off the lead. The dogs' movements were measurably influenced by underlying social hierarchies and personality differences.

Stanford scientists are using weak vibrations generated by the Earth's oceans to produce "virtual earthquakes" that can be used to predict the ground movement and shaking hazard to buildings from real quakes.

[VIDEO AT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTg3GzGCRfA]