Earth

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers found a previously unmapped fault was responsible for the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti and that the originally blamed fault remains ready to produce a large earthquake.

EAST LANSING, Mich. – The impact of China's devastating 2008 earthquake was substantially lessened by environmental conservation programs for some of the country's most fragile habitats, according to research published in a journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science this week.

Producing tightly focused beams of high energy X-rays, to examine everything from molecular structures to the integrity of aircraft wings, could become simpler and cheaper according to new research.

Today, in Nature Physics, researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Michigan and Instituto Superior Téchnico Lisbon describe a tabletop instrument that produces synchrotron X-rays, whose energy and quality rivals that produced by some of the largest X-ray facilities in the world.

Beating the flu has always been tough, but it has gotten even more difficult in recent years. Two of the four antiviral drugs used to treat a nasty case of the influenza A virus no longer work.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Oct. 21, 2010 -- Tin may seem like the most unassuming of elements, but experiments performed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are yielding surprising properties in extremely short-lived isotopes near tin-100's "doubly magic" nucleus.

Vegetation plays an unexpectedly large role in cleansing the atmosphere, a new study finds.

AMES, Iowa – The flu virus uses a shuttle mechanism to relay protons through a channel in a process necessary for the virus to infect a host cell, according to a research project led by Mei Hong of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory.

Beating the flu is already tough, but it has become even harder in recent years – the influenza A virus has mutated so that two antiviral drugs don't slow it down anymore.

WASHINGTON, D.C., (Oct. 20, 2010) -- Just as landscape photographs shot in low-angle light dramatically accentuate subtle swales and mounds, depositing metal vapors at glancing angles turns a rough surface into amazing nanostructures with a vast range of potential properties.

WASHINGTON, D.C., (Oct. 20, 2010) -- The capture and storage of carbon dioxide in deep geologic formations, a strategy for minimizing the impacts of greenhouse gases on global warming, may currently be technologically feasible. But one key question that must be answered is the ability of subsurface materials to maintain their integrity in the presence of supercritical carbon dioxide -- a fluid state in which the gas is condensed at high temperature and pressure into a liquid.

The UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is working to provide more reliable measurement of the electrical properties of materials used in nanotechnology – which could lead to much more accurate devices in the future.

Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) won the Nobel Prize in 1986. It uses a nano-sized probe to feel the surface of a material – akin to a finger reading Braille on an extremely small scale. The technique can also measure the electrical properties of materials used in nanotechnology – and "feel" how the materials react when electricity is passed through it.

Washington, D.C. (October 19, 2010) -- Chinese researchers, reporting in the Journal of Applied Physics, published by the American Institute of Physics, have described a new breakthrough in understanding the way electrons travel around quantum dots. This might lead to promising new fabrication methods of novel quantum devices.

WASHINGTON, D.C., (Oct. 19, 2010) -- The prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections is well known, causing an estimated 19,000 deaths and $3-4 billion in healthcare costs per year in the U.S. What is less well known is that this increased infection and resistance rate has not been met with a simultaneous development of novel antimicrobial and antibiotic agents; in fact, only three classes of antibiotics have been developed since the 1950s.