Earth

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 1, 2010 -- Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the University of Tennessee (UT) and six collaborating universities have performed an unprecedented nuclear reaction experiment that explores the unique properties of the "doubly magic" radioactive isotope of 132Sn, or tin-132.

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New York City is establishing itself as a global leader in forming a proactive response to climate change, reveals a new report detailing the city's plans to adapt to the challenges and opportunities the changing climate presents. The plans, revealed in the first report of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) and published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, outline the measures the city will take to proactively respond to climate change in a way that will provide both long-term environmental, and short-term economic, benefits to the city.

Geneva, 31 May 2010. Researchers on the OPERA experiment at the INFN*'s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy today announced the first direct observation of a tau particle in a muon neutrino beam sent through the Earth from CERN**, 730km away. This is a significant result, providing the final missing piece of a puzzle that has been challenging science since the 1960s, and giving tantalizing hints of new physics to come.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Sea level has not been as high as the distinctive ridges that run down the length of Florida for millions of years. Yet recently deposited marine fossils abound in the ridges' sands.

Now, a University of Florida geologist may have helped crack that mystery.

HOUSTON -- (May 30, 2010) -- In a development that could lead to novel carbon composites and touch-screen displays, researchers from Rice University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology today unveiled a new method for producing bulk quantities of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon called graphene.

The research is available online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Materials Design (www.materialsdesign.com) announces a joint presentation with University of Texas at Dallas, KAUST, and Texas Instruments at the 2010 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits on June 17th in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The presentation will describe the results of a close collaboration including experiment and atomistic simulation, and illustrates the power of this complementarity in guiding the development of materials and processes for microelectronic applications.

HOUSTON -- (May 28, 2010) -- A team of U.S. and Chinese physicists are zeroing in on critical effects at the heart of the latest high-temperature superconductors -- but they're using other materials to do it.

In new research appearing online today in the journal Physical Review Letters, the Rice University-led team offers new evidence about the quantum features of the latest class of high-temperature superconductors, a family of iron-based compounds called "pnictides" (pronounced: NICK-tides).

Geological investigations in the Himalayas have revealed evidence that when India and Asia collided some 90 million years ago, the continental crust of the Indian tectonic plate was forced down under the Asian plate, sinking down into the Earth's mantle to a depth of at least 200 km kilometres1.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 27, 2010 – Imagine creating novel devices with amazing and exotic optical properties not found in Nature—by simply evaporating a droplet of particles on a surface.

Scientists have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.

The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository – something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.

Sarcopenia — low skeletal muscle mass and strength — is often found in obese people and older adults; it has been hypothesized that sarcopenia puts individuals at risk for developing Type 2 diabetes.

To gauge the effect of sarcopenia on insulin resistance (the root cause of Type 2 diabetes) and blood glucose levels in both obese and non-obese people, UCLA researchers performed a cross-sectional analysis of data on 14,528 people from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III.