Earth

Pumping nutrient-rich water up from the deep ocean to boost algal growth in sunlit surface waters and draw carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere has been touted as a way of ameliorating global warming. However, a new study led by Professor Andreas Oschlies of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany, pours cold water on the idea.

While airplane and rocket experiments have proved that gravity makes clocks tick more slowly – a central prediction of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity – a new experiment in an atom interferometer measures this slowdown 10,000 times more accurately than before, and finds it to be exactly what Einstein predicted.

The result shows once again how well Einstein's theory describes the real world, said Holger Müller, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

HOUSTON -- (Feb. 17, 2010) -- When Earth was young, it exhaled the atmosphere. During a period of intense volcanic activity, lava carried light elements from the planet's molten interior and released them into the sky. However, some light elements got trapped inside the planet. In this week's issue of Nature, a Rice University-based team of scientists is offering a new answer to a longstanding mystery: What caused Earth to hold its last breath?

Two University of Colorado at Boulder physicists are part of a collaborative team working with the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York that have created the hottest temperature matter ever measured in the universe -- 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit.

A collaboration between researchers at Northwestern University's Center for Catalysis and scientists at Oxford University has produced a new approach for understanding surfaces, particularly metal oxide surfaces, widely used in industry as supports for catalysts.

This knowledge of the surface layer of atoms is critical to understanding a material's overall properties. The findings were published online Feb. 14 by the journal Nature Materials.

Geoengineering -- deliberate manipulation of the Earth's climate to slow or reverse global warming -- has gained a foothold in the climate change discussion. But before effective action can be taken, the Earth's natural biogeochemical cycles must be better understood.

A new nanotech catalyst developed by McGill University Chemists Chao-Jun Li, Audrey Moores and their colleagues offers industry an opportunity to reduce the use of expensive and toxic heavy metals. Catalysts are substances used to facilitate and drive chemical reactions. Although chemists have long been aware of the ecological and economic impact of traditional chemical catalysts and do attempt to reuse their materials, it is generally difficult to separate the catalyzing chemicals from the finished product. The team's discovery does away with this chemical process altogether.

Welding uses heat to join pieces of metal in everything from circuits to skyscrapers. But Rice University researchers have found a way to beat the heat on the nanoscale.

Jun Lou, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and materials science, and his group have discovered that gold wires between three-billionths and 10-billionths of a meter wide weld themselves together quite nicely – without heat.

Diamonds are renowned for their seemingly flawless physical beauty and their interplay with light.Now researchers are taking advantage of the mineral's imperfections to control that light at the atomic scale, generating one photon at a time.

A team of engineers and applied physicists from Harvard University, the Technical University of Munich and Texas A&M has sculpted a novel nanowire from diamond crystal and shown that the wire can act as a source of single photons. The team reported its findings online Feb. 14 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Most Americans like the idea of conservation, but few practice it in their everyday lives, according to the results of a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities.

A majority of Americans say that it is "very important" or "somewhat important" to turn off unneeded lights (92 percent), to lower the thermostat in winter (83 percent), and to use public transportation or a carpool (73 percent), among other conservation behaviors. Yet the study found that:

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers report that they have discovered – and now know how to exploit – an unusual chemical reaction mechanism that allows malaria parasites and many disease-causing bacteria to survive. The research team, from the University of Illinois, also has developed the first potent inhibitor of this chemical reaction.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

UPTON, NY — Recent analyses from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference "atom smasher" at Brookhaven National Laboratory, establish that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light have created matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius — the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory, about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. This temperature, based upon measurements by the PHENIX collaboration at RHIC, is higher than the temperature needed to melt protons and neutrons into a plasma of quarks and gluons.

UPTON, NY — Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator, report the first hints of profound symmetry transformations in the hot soup of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons produced in RHIC's most energetic collisions. In particular, the new results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, suggest that "bubbles" formed within this hot soup may internally disobey the so-called "mirror symmetry" that normally characterizes the interactions of quarks and gluons.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Feb. 12, 2010 -- By taking advantage of a phenomenon that until now has been a virtual showstopper for electronics designers, a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Panos Datskos is developing a chemical and biological sensor with unprecedented sensitivity.

Ultimately, researchers believe this new "sniffer" will achieve a detection level that approaches the theoretical limit, surpassing other state-of-the-art chemical sensors. The implications could be significant for anyone whose job is to detect explosives, biological agents and narcotics.

New Haven, Conn.—Yale University scientists have streamlined the process for synthesizing a family of compounds with the potential to kill cancer and other diseased cells, and have found that they represent a unique category of anti-cancer agents. Their discovery appears in this week's online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.