Earth

Approximately 13 million metric tons of rare earth elements (REE) exist within known deposits in the United States, according to the first-ever nationwide estimate of these elements by the U.S. Geological Survey.

This estimate of domestic rare earth deposits is part of a larger report that includes a review of global sources for REE, information on known deposits that might provide domestic sources of REE in the future, and geologic information crucial for studies of the availability of REE to U.S. industry.

MADISON — Months of volcanic restlessness preceded the eruptions this spring of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, providing insight into what roused it from centuries of slumber.

An international team of researchers analyzed geophysical changes in the long-dormant volcano leading up to its eruptions in March and April 2010 that suggest that magma flowing beneath the volcano may have triggered its reawakening. Their study is published in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature.

Geneva, 17 November 2011. The ALPHA experiment at CERN has taken an important step forward in developing techniques to understand one of the Universe's open questions: is there a difference between matter and antimatter? In a paper published in Nature today, the collaboration shows that it has successfully produced and trapped atoms of antihydrogen. This development opens the path to new ways of making detailed measurements of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.

Physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, have succeeded in trapping antihydrogen – the antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom – a milestone that could soon lead to experiments on a form of matter that disappeared mysteriously shortly after the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago.

In the movie Angels and Demons, scientists have solved one of the most perplexing scientific problems: the capture and storage of antimatter. In real life, trapping atomic antimatter has never been accomplished, until now.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge are working on ways to improve the efficiency of the ammonia synthesis process. With between 3-5% of the world's natural gas used to create artificial fertilizers, the new research could have major implications for both the agricultural and energy sectors.

A Princeton scientist with an interdisciplinary bent has taken two well-known problems in mathematics and reformulated them as a physics question, offering new tools to solve challenges relevant to a host of subjects ranging from improving data compression to detecting gravitational waves.

BERKELEY, Calif.—The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), already one of the world's leading centers for scientific productivity, is now home to the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world and the second most powerful in the United States, according to the latest edition of the TOP500 list, the definitive ranking of the world's top computers.

The landform known as a drumlin, created when the ice advanced during the Ice Age, can also be produced by today's glaciers. This discovery, made by researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has just been published in the scientific journal Geology.

While a range of ingenious man-made materials bring us ever closer to realising the possibility of cloaking objects from visible light, research from Imperial College London is now taking invisibility into the fourth dimension - time - creating the groundbreaking potential to hide whole events.

The laws of physics might make the creation of a transporter which can dematerialise objects and then rematerialise them elsewhere a little beyond us, but it is now being suggested that an object could move from one region of space to another, completely unseen by anyone watching.

The Earth is constantly manufacturing new crust, spewing molten magma up along undersea ridges at the boundaries of tectonic plates. The process is critical to the planet's metabolism, including the cycle of underwater life and the delicate balance of carbon in the ocean and atmosphere.

Now, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have observed ocean crust forming in an entirely unexpected way—one that may influence those cycles of life and carbon and, in turn, affect the much-discussed future of the world's climate.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The website of the Nobel Prize shows a cat resting in a graphene hammock. Although fictitious, the image captures the excitement around graphene, which, at one atom thick, is the among the thinnest and strongest materials ever produced.

BATON ROUGE – LSU's Sibel Bargu, along with her former graduate student Ana Garcia, from the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences in LSU's School of the Coast & Environment, has discovered toxic algae in vast, remote regions of the open ocean for the first time. The recent findings were published in the Nov. 8 edition of one of the most prestigious scientific journals, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS.