Earth

The rubber boots that emergency personnel wear when responding to situations where hazardous materials (HazMat) are present may be functional, but they're not very comfortable. New research coming out of North Carolina State University hopes to provide a next generation HazMat boot that meets both criteria.

ITHACA, N.Y. – When it comes to potentially doubling the output of the world's fourth largest food crop, the secret may be in the spit.

Researchers at Cornell University, as well as the University of Goettingen and National University of Colombia, have discovered that when a major South American pest infests potato tubers, the plant produces bigger spuds.

Climate change is about more than just polar bears. That is the message from Dr Kate Manzo whose research into climate change communication has been published in Meteorological Applications. The research, which reviews the efforts of journalists, campaigners and politicians to engage the British public with climate change, explores how new 'visual strategies' can communicate climate change messages against a backdrop of increased climate scepticism.

Researchers at the Department of Chemistry and Nanoscience Center (NSC) of the University of Jyväskylä (Dr Olga Lopez-Acevedo and Professor Hannu Häkkinen) have resolved the structural, electronic and optical properties of a chiral gold nanocluster that remained a mystery for ten years. The theoretical structure was confirmed via comparison to experimental results obtained by X-ray diffraction from powder samples of the pure cluster material. The theoretical work was done in collaboration with researchers at Kansas State University and the experimental part at Hokkaido University.

There's more to decisions about land use than climate change, population growth, migration and prosperous economies. In the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, individual religious beliefs in local Saints are also linked to how the Amazig (Berber) people use their environment and manage local resources. These findings1 by Dr.

In the first peer-reviewed scientific paper to be published about the Icelandic volcano since its eruption in April 2010, UK researchers write that the ash plume which hovered over Scotland carried a significant and self-renewing electric charge.

The volcano-chasing researchers argue this adds a further dimension to understanding the detailed nature of volcanic plumes and their effects on air travel.

TORONTO, ON – A study by researchers at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum sheds new light on a previously unclassifiable 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore known as Nectocaris pteryx.

A halo may be difficult to acquire in terms of virtue, but it can also be tough to calculate in terms of physics. Thomas Papenbrock, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his colleagues Gaute Hagen from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Morten Hjorth-Jensen from the University of Oslo have managed to do just that, however, and report their findings in "Ab-initio computation of the 17F proton-halo state and resonances in A = 17 nuclei," published earlier this month in Physical Review Letters.

Research published this week in PLoS Medicine by Toby Leslie and colleagues shows that the Mediterranean G6PD variant protects against P. vivax infection in a cohort of Afghan refugees. Although further studies are needed to determine whether other G6PD variants protect against P. vivax malaria, these findings suggest that P. vivax malaria might be responsible for the retention of the G6PD deficiency trait in some human populations.

A study by Paul Pharoah and colleagues published in this week's PLoS Medicine evaluates immunohistochemistry-based subtype classification of breast tumors for the prediction of disease outcome. Their analysis is based on more than 10,000 breast cancer cases with early disease, and examines the influence of a patient's tumour type on the prediction of future survival.

Graphane is the material of choice for physicists on the cutting edge of materials science, and Rice University researchers are right there with the pack – and perhaps a little ahead.

Researchers mentored by Boris Yakobson, a Rice professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry, have discovered the strategic extraction of hydrogen atoms from a two-dimensional sheet of graphane naturally opens up spaces of pure graphene that look – and act – like quantum dots.

University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist Michael Whalen is part of a team of distinguished scientists who recently compiled a wide swath of evidence striking a definitive blow in the ongoing battle over what killed the dinosaurs. In a review published in the March 5 issue of the journal Science, the research group reaffirmed the recently challenged theory that an asteroid ended the age of the dinosaurs. Scientists first proposed the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur mass extinction 30 years ago.

The eruption of the volcano in Iceland has drawn attention to air flow patterns, as airlines lost millions of dollars and travelers remained stranded for days to weeks, as particles from the natural disaster traveled over Europe, forcing closures of major airports.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Why is there matter in the universe and not antimatter, its opposite?

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The major earthquakes that devastated Chile earlier this year and which triggered the catastrophic Indonesian tsunami of 2004 are more than just a distinct possibility to strike the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, scientists say.

There is more than a one-in-three chance that it will happen within the next 50 years.