Earth

RICHLAND, Wash. - An improved titanium alloy -- stronger than any commercial titanium alloy currently on the market -- gets its strength from the novel way atoms are arranged to form a special nanostructure. For the first time, researchers have been able to see this alignment and then manipulate it to make the strongest titanium alloy ever developed, and with a lower cost process to boot.

Climate is not constant on Earth. Consider ice ages coming and going as an example. Parallel to ice age cycles, atmospheric carbon dioxide reduces during glacial periods and increases during warmer times, although modern fossil fuel-related carbon dioxide emission broke this natural cyclicity. With the proper proxy measurements, scientists can look into these past cycles to determine how exactly climate systems were naturally governed.

The world is run by catalysts. They clean up after cars, help make fertilizers, and could be the key to better hydrogen fuel. Now, a team of chemists, led by Xiaohu Xia from Michigan Technological University, has found a better way to make metal nanoframe catalysts.

Last week, Nano Letters published the team's study, which covers how the researchers made a catalyst for the first time out of the noble metal ruthenium.

In manganese monosilicide (MnSi), microscopic magnetic vortices - skyrmions - may behave as "collectivists" or "individuals", i.e. they are able to create a single structure, or they can also split up individually. These are the findings of scientists from MIPT and Prokhorov General Physics Institute of RAS. Studying the behaviour of skyrmions will help to create unique quantum devices based on new physical principles.

A new explanation of how gypsum forms may change the way we process this important building material, as well as allow us to interpret past water availability on other planets such as Mars. The work is reported in Nature Communications*.

The idea of climate change turning the UK into a viable wine-making region may have boosted the industry in recent years. But cold snaps, sharp frosts and downpours threaten productivity - according to University of East Anglia research.

As UK wine producers prepare for what they hope will be a bumper 2016 season a study published today reveals that year-to-year climate variability and hazardous weather at key points in the growing season leave the industry highly sensitive to the elements.

X-rays have long been used to make pictures of tiny objects, even single atoms. Now a team of scientists has discovered a new use for X-rays at the atomic scale: using them like a radar gun to measure the motion and velocity of complex and messy groups of atoms.

"It's a bit like a police speed trap -- for atomic and nanoscale defects," says Randall Headrick, a professor of physics at the University of Vermont who led the research team. The new technique was reported on March 28 in the journal Nature Physics.

TINY PORES

Boulder, Colo., USA: Landscapes are formed by a combination of uplift and erosion. Uplift from plate tectonics raises the land surface; erosion by rivers and landslides wears the land surface back down. In this study, Georgina L. Bennett and colleagues examine the interplay of uplift and erosion along the coast range of Northern California to understand how the modern topography is built.

HOUSTON - (March 31, 2016) - Rice University scientists have determined that two-dimensional boron is a natural low-temperature superconductor. In fact, it may be the only 2-D material with such potential.

Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his co-workers published their calculations that show atomically flat boron is metallic and will transmit electrons with no resistance. The work appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

After years of study, University of South Florida College of Marine Science researchers and colleagues have identified reasons why some years are worse than others for the harmful alga bloom (HAB) Karenia brevis, called "red tide," when it occurs off the west coast of Florida.

A James Cook University study has found turtles released back into the wild almost always return home -- even if they have to swim more than 100km or have spent more than a year away.

Lead author, Dr Takahiro Shimada said the JCU team tracked 59 turtles released outside of the areas where they had been found along the Queensland coast.

"We lost communication with the tracking devices on two of them, but all except one of the rest returned home," he said.

Superconducting materials have the characteristic of letting an electric current flow without resistance. The study of superconductors with a high critical temperature discovered in the 1980s remains a very attractive research subject for physicists. Indeed, many experimental observations still lack an adequate theoretical description. Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in Switzerland and the Technical University Munich in Germany have managed to lift the veil on the electronic characteristics of high-temperature superconductors.

Up until now catching lightning in a bottle has been easier than reproducing a range of earthquakes in the laboratory, according to a team of seismologists who can now duplicate the range of fault slip modes found during earthquakes, quiet periods and slow earthquakes.

"We were never able to make slow stick slip happen in the laboratory," said Christopher Marone, professor of geosciences, Penn State. "Our ability to systematically control stick velocity starts with this paper."

Unusually warm oceans can have widespread effects on marine ecosystems. Warm patches off the Pacific Northwest from 2013 to 2015, and a couple of years earlier in the Atlantic Ocean, affected everything from sea lions to fish migration routes to coastal weather.

A University of Washington oceanographer is lead author of a study looking at the history of such features across the Northern Hemisphere. The study was published in March in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

A University of Oklahoma-led team of physicists believes chip-based atomic physics holds promise to make the second quantum revolution--the engineering of quantum matter with arbitrary precision--a reality. With recent technological advances in fabrication and trapping, hybrid quantum systems are emerging as ideal platforms for a diverse range of studies in quantum control, quantum simulation and computing.