Earth

The American chestnut was a dominant species in eastern U.S.'s forests before a blight wiped it out in the early 1900s. Today it's being returned to the landscape thanks in part to work by a University of Tennessee Forestry alumna and the UT Tree Improvement Program (UT TIP).

CLEMSON — In a new study, Clemson University researchers have concluded that the number of hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic Basin is increasing, but there is no evidence that their individual strengths are any greater than storms of the past or that the chances of a U.S. strike are up.

Robert Lund, professor of mathematical sciences at Clemson, along with colleagues Michael Robbins and Colin Gallagher of Clemson and QiQi Lu of Mississippi State University, studied changes in the tropical cycle record in the North Atlantic between 1851 and 2008.

After decades of debate and four years of investigation an international body of earth scientists has formally agreed to move the boundary dates for the prehistoric Quaternary age by 800,000 years, reports the Journal of Quaternary Science.

The decision has been made by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the authority for geological science which has acted to end decades of controversy by formally declaring when the Quaternary Period, which covers both the ice age and moment early man first started to use tools, began.

Nuclear magnetic moment is one of the most important physical observables. The precise measurement of nuclear magnetic moment and its understanding in microscopic way are quite a challenge in nuclear physics. The research team at Peking University, who has dedicated to the study of nuclear structure and astrophysics for the last decades, has applied the configuration-fixed deformation constrained RMF approach with time-odd component to investigate the ground-state properties of 33Mg and reproduce the data self-consistently without introducing any parameter.

By merging more than a decade of atmospheric data from European satellites, scientists have compiled a homogeneous long-term ozone record that allows them to monitor total ozone trends on a global scale – and the findings look promising.

Scientists merged monthly total ozone data derived from the vertically downward-looking measurements of the GOME instrument on ESA's ERS-2 satellite, SCIAMACHY on ESA's Envisat and GOME-2 on the European Meteorological Satellite Organization's MetOp-A.

Scientists have found the "Rosetta Stone" of supervolcanoes, those giant pockmarks in the Earth's surface produced by rare and massive explosive eruptions that rank among nature's most violent events. The eruptions produce devastation on a regional scale — and possibly trigger climatic and environmental effects at a global scale.

A Tiny, Tunable Well of Light

A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world's low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk.

The drug-delivery system, developed by Einstein scientists, consists of nanoparticles – each smaller than a grain of pollen – that can carry tiny payloads of various drugs or other medically useful substances and release them in a controlled and sustained manner.

The limited number of topical formulations of ED drugs has so far proven ineffective. This study was done to evaluate whether the Einstein nanoparticles, which have been shown to penetrate the skin, might allow the targeted delivery of compounds that treat ED and thereby avoid the drugs' systemic effects.

University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant researcher Durrell Kapan recently published a paper, Man Bites Mosquito: Understanding the Contribution of Human Movement to Vector-Borne Disease Dynamics, in PLoS One. Published August 26, the paper highlights how daily commuting patterns in mega-cities may be a critically overlooked factor in understanding the resurgence of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever, infecting 50-100 million people annually.

Predicting harmful algal blooms, or HABs, in the Great Lakes is now a reality as NOAA announces an experimental HAB forecast system in Lake Erie. HABs produce toxins that may pose a significant risk to human and animal health through water recreation and may form scum that are unsightly and odorous to beach visitors, impacting the coastal economy. Forecasts depicting current and future locations of blooms, as well as intensity, will alert scientists and managers to possible threats to the Great Lakes beaches and assist in mitigation efforts.

A 9-foot dinosaur from northeastern China had evolved all the hallmark anatomical features of Tyrannosaurus rex at least 125 million years ago, 30 million years before its descendant would rule the world. University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno and five co-authors describe the newly discovered dinosaur in the Sept. 17 Science Express.

When you think of Tyrannosaurus rex, a small set of striking physical traits comes to mind: an oversized skull with powerful jaws, tiny forearms, and the muscular hind legs of a runner. But, researchers have just unearthed a much smaller tyrannosauroid in China, no more than three meters long, that displays all the same features – and it predates the T. rex by tens of millions of years.

Results: For the first time, MIT scientists have observed ferromagnetism in an atomic gas, addressing the decades-old question of whether gases could show properties similar to a magnet made of iron or nickel. Specifically, the team observed the ferromagnetic behavior in a gas of lithium atoms cooled to 150 billionth of 1 Kelvin above absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -459 degrees F). Team members used the lithium-6 isotope, which consists of three protons, three neutrons and three electrons.

In recent years several Large-Scale Scientific Facilities (LSSF) for nuclear, hadronic, and particle physics have been upgraded and constructed in China. The Cooling Storage Ring of Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL-CSR) was completed in 2007, which aims at the exploration of physics with radioactive ion beams (including the structure of unstable nuclei, isospin dependence of nuclear matter, heavy-ion fusion, superheavy nuclei synthesis), hadronic physics, physics of high-energy density matter, physics of highly charged ions, and applications.