Earth

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---California's San Andreas fault is notorious for repeatedly generating major earthquakes and for being on the brink of producing the next "big one" in a heavily populated area. But the famously violent fault also has quieter sections, where rocks easily slide against each other without giving rise to damaging quakes.

Human-driven changes in the earth's atmospheric composition are likely to alter plant diseases of the future. Researchers predict carbon dioxide will reach levels double those of the preindustrial era by the year 2050, complicating agriculture's need to produce enough food for a rapidly growing population.

Recovering addicts who avoid coping with stress succumb easily to substance use cravings, making them more likely to relapse during recovery, according to behavioral researchers.

"Cravings are a strong predictor of relapse," said H. Harrington Cleveland, associate professor of human development, Penn State. "The goal of this study is to predict the variation in substance craving in a person on a within-day basis. Because recovery must be maintained 'one day at a time,' researchers have to understand it on the same daily level."

Cosmologists at UCL (University College London) are a step closer to determining the mass of the elusive neutrino particle, not by using a giant particle detector, but by gazing up into space.

Although it has been shown that a neutrino has a mass, it is vanishingly small and extremely hard to measure – a neutrino is capable of passing through a light year (about six trillion miles) of lead without hitting a single atom.

Analyses of serological and social contact data from five European countries by Mirjam Kretzschmar and colleagues show that childhood vaccination against Bordetella pertussis (whooping cough) has shifted the burden of infection from children to adolescents and adults. Adolescents and adults rarely develop severe pertussis

The SLAC linear collider in Menlo Park, California has already made a name for itself as one of the world's largest and most prolific particle accelerator facilities dedicated to high energy particle physics. It is now beginning a new life as a source of x-rays a billion times brighter than any other research x-ray source to date. Early results that reveal how molecules respond to intense radiation from the facility's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) are set to be published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters.

College Park, MD (June 22, 2010) -- As you go about your day-to-day activities, tiny bubbles of nitrogen come and go inside your tissues. This is not a problem unless you happen to experience large changes in ambient pressure, such as those encountered by scuba divers and astronauts. During large, fast pressure drops, these bubbles can grow and lead to decompression sickness, popularly known as "the bends."

In August of 2008 Jacob Schaefer, PhD, on vacation in San Diego, picked up a copy of the Los Angeles Times.

As it happened, the newspaper was running a series on the wildfires in the western United States.

College Park, MD (June 22, 2010) -- As cell phones and computers continue to shrink, many companies are seeking better ways to store hundreds of gigabytes of data in small, low-power devices.

A special type of liquid crystal, similar to those used in computer displays and televisions, offers a solution. Unlike CDs and DVDs, which store information only on their surface, lasers can encode data throughout a liquid crystal. Known as holographic storage, the technique makes it possible to pack much more information in a tiny space.

Computer simulations performed by researchers at the National Oceanography Centre and the University of Glasgow show how oceanic stirring and mixing influence the formation and dynamics of plankton patches in the upper ocean.