Earth

When Planet Earth was just cooling down from its fiery creation, the sun was faint and young. So faint that it should not have been able to keep the oceans of earth from freezing. But fortunately for the creation of life, water was kept liquid on our young planet.

For years scientists have debated what could have kept earth warm enough to prevent the oceans from freezing solid. Now a team of researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology and University of Copenhagen's department of chemistry have coaxed an explanation out of ancient rocks, as reported in this week's issue of PNAS

These recyclable liquids require much less energy to heat but can hold two times more harmful gases by weight than the current leading liquid absorbent used in power plants. It is a combination of water and monoethanolamine, a basic organic molecule that grabs the carbon dioxide.

PNNL's previous work with the all-organic liquids focused on pulling only carbon dioxide out of emissions from power plants. New work will show how the process can be applied to other acid gases such as sulfur dioxide.

Heavier rainstorms lie in our future. That's the clear conclusion of a new MIT and Caltech study on the impact that global climate change will have on precipitation patterns.

But the increase in extreme downpours is not uniformly spread around the world, the analysis shows. While the pattern is clear and consistent outside of the tropics, climate models give conflicting results within the tropics and more research will be needed to determine the likely outcomes in tropical regions.

Tropical Depression Ana is currently drenching Puerto Rico, and tropical storm watches are posted for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands as Ana continues westward. Both the Aqua and GOES satellites have captured Ana on her westward track in the Atlantic.

Hurricane Bill was upgraded to a hurricane by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami, Florida on August 17 at 5 a.m. EDT. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite flew over hurricane Bill a short time later at 1133 UTC (7:33 a.m. EDT) and captured Bill's "baby picture" shortly after he became the first hurricane in the Atlantic this season.

Quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity are both extremely accurate theories of how the universe works, but all attempts to combine the two into a unified theory have ended in failure. When physicists try to calculate the properties of a quantum theory of gravity, they find quantities that become infinite -- infinities that are so bad they can't be removed by mathematical gambits that work in other areas of physics.

Scientists at the University of Calgary have found that methane emission by plants could be a bigger problem in global warming than previously thought.

A U of C study says that when crops are exposed to environmental factors that are part of climate change -- increased temperature, drought and ultraviolet-B radiation -- some plants show enhanced methane emissions. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas; 23 times more effective in trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When Apollo punished King Midas by giving him donkey ears, only the king and his barber knew. Unable to keep a secret, the barber dug a hole, whispered into it, "King Midas has donkey ears," and filled the hole. But plants sprouted from the hole, and with each passing breeze, shared the king's secret.

Washington, DC—New research about what triggers earthquakes, authored by Michael Strasser of Bremen University, Germany, with colleagues from the USA, Japan, China, France, and Germany, will appear in the Aug. 16 2009 issue of Nature Geoscience (online version). The research article, titled "Origin and evolution of a splay-fault in the Nankai accretionary wedge" is drawn from the scientists' participation in the Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE), a long-term scientific ocean-drilling project conducted by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).

CSIRO and the Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia (DAFWA) are collaborating to try to outwit one of southern Australia's worst agricultural weeds.

"We are initiating a one-year study to see if it would be feasible to control one and two-leaf Cape tulips (Moraea flaccida and M. miniata) using the rust fungus Puccinia moraeae as a biological control agent," CSIRO Entomology's Dr John Scott said.

Massive burning of forests for agriculture thousands of years ago may have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide enough to alter global climate and usher in a warming trend that continues today, according to a new study that appears online Aug. 17 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2009 — The first dry powder inhalable vaccine for measles is moving toward clinical trials next year in India, where the disease still sickens millions of infants and children and kills almost 200,000 annually, according to a report presented here today at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2009 — Will the universe expand outward for all of eternity and end in a vast, dark, cold, sterile, diffuse nothingness? Or will the "Big Bang" — the gargantuan explosion that formed the universe 14 billion years ago — end in the "Big Crunch?" Planets, stars and galaxies all hurtle inward and collapse into an incredibly hot, dense mass a billion times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. And then … KA-BOOOOM!!! Another Big Bang and another universe forms and hurtles outward, eventually leading to new iterations of the Sun, the Earth, and you?

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, AIRS, is one of six instruments on board the Aqua satellite, part of the NASA Earth Observing System.

Its purpose is to detect trends in climate variation and observe water and energy cycles.

AIRS uses infrared technology to create 3-D maps of air and surface temperature, water vapor, and cloud properties. Its 2,378 spectral channels provide a spectral resolution more than 100 times greater than previous IR sounders and give more accurate information on the vertical profiles of atmospheric temperature and moisture.

The Atlantic Ocean's second Tropical Depression has been on shaky ground since it formed early in the week of August 11. It meandered westward from the African coast and maintained its tropical depression status until weakening to a remnant low. Now it has the potential to come back. In addition to Tropical Depression 2, there are three other areas forecasters are watching in the Atlantic Basin. Residents of Florida should particularly be watchful as there's a potential for tropical development on both the east and west coasts this weekend.