Earth

Community-based education and awareness programs minimized the death toll from the recent Samoan tsunami, though there are still ways to improve the warning and evacuation process, according to a team of researchers that traveled to Samoa last month.

The team, funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, collected data Oct. 4 through Oct. 11 to document the impacts of the 8.1 earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that occurred on Sept. 29. They examined flow depths, run-up heights, inundation distances, sediment depositions and damage patterns at various scales.

Patients experiencing septic shock who receive inappropriate therapy may have a fivefold reduction in survival, shows a new study. Researchers from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, retrospectively reviewed the cases of 5,715 patients with septic shock to determine the appropriateness of initial antimicrobial therapy, clinical infection site, and relevant pathogens.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Physicists at Harvard University have created a quantum gas microscope that can be used to observe single atoms at temperatures so low the particles follow the rules of quantum mechanics, behaving in bizarre ways.

The work, published this week in the journal Nature, represents the first time scientists have detected single atoms in a crystalline structure made solely of light, called a Bose Hubbard optical lattice. It's part of scientists' efforts to use ultracold quantum gases to understand and develop novel quantum materials.

When small earthquakes shake the central U.S., citizens often fear the rumbles are signs a big earthquake is coming. Fortunately, new research instead shows that most of these earthquakes are aftershocks of big earthquakes (magnitude 7) in the New Madrid seismic zone that struck the Midwest almost 200 years ago.

The study, conducted by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Missouri-Columbia, will be published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard materials scientists have come up with what they believe is a new way to model the formation of glasses, a type of amorphous solid that includes common window glass.

Glasses form through the process of vitrification, in which a glass-forming liquid cools and slowly becomes a solid whose molecules, though they've stopped moving, are not permanently locked into a crystal structure. Instead, they're more like a liquid that has merely stopped flowing, though they can continue to move over long stretches of time.

BOULDER, Colo. – A team from the University of Miami, University of El Paso and University of Rochester have employed Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images compiled over a decade to study volcanic activity in the African Rift. The study, published in the November issue of Geology, studies the section of the rift in Kenya.

A theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a method for calculating the motions and forces of thousands of atoms simultaneously over a wider range of time scales than previously possible. The method overcomes a longstanding timing gap in modeling nanometer-scale materials and many other physical, chemical and biological systems at atomic and molecular levels.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. – Cholera, an acute diarrheal disease caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, has reemerged as a global killer. Outbreaks typically occur once a year in Africa and Latin America. But in Bangladesh the epidemics occur twice a year – in the spring and again in the fall.

Source:

What's the point of setting up marine reserves to protect coral reefs from pollution, ship groundings and overfishing if climate change could cause far more damage? A study published this week in London in Proceedings of the Royal Society B provides the answer.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. ╤ Researchers say regional surface temperatures can be affected by land use, suggesting that local and regional strategies, such as creating green spaces and buffer zones in and around urban areas, could be a tool in addressing climate change.

The vast muddy expanses of the abyssal plains occupy about 60 percent of the Earth's surface and are important in global carbon cycling. Based on long-term studies of two such areas, a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that animal communities on the abyssal seafloor are affected in a variety of ways by climate change.

Radiation dose delivered to the prostate and nearby organs in every brachytherapy procedure should be carefully analyzed using post-implant CT or MRI and uniformly documented in every patient, according to a new guideline co-authored by Yan Yu, Ph.D., director of Medical Physics in the department of Radiation Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University.

The guideline was issued by a task group commissioned by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), and will be published in the November 2009 issue of Medical Physics.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Most land use changes occurring in the continental U.S result in raised regional surface temperatures, says a new study by scientists at the University of Maryland, Purdue University and the University of Colorado in Boulder.

In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world's oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.