Earth

When you toss a coin, you either get heads or tails but things are not so definite at the microcosmic level. An atomic 'coin' can display a superposition of heads and tails when it has been thrown though this only happens if you do not look at the coin.

Berkeley -- Increases in mysterious underground tremors observed in several active earthquake fault zones around the world could signal a build-up of stress at locked segments of the faults and presumably an increased likelihood of a major quake, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study.

Where the first Americans came from, when they arrived and how they got here is as lively a debate as ever, only most of the research to date has focused on dry land excavations. But, last summer's pivotal underwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico led by Mercyhurst College archaeologist Dr. James Adovasio yielded evidence of inundated terrestrial sites that may well have supported human occupation more than 12,000 years ago, and paved the way for another expedition this July.

Through a recent modeling experiment, a team of NASA-funded researchers have found that future concentrations of carbon dioxide and ozone in the atmosphere and of nitrogen in the soil are likely to have an important but overlooked effect on the cycling of water from sky to land to waterways.

Since its discovery just a few years ago, graphene has climbed to the top of the heap of new super-materials poised to transform the electronics and nanotechnology landscape. As N.J. Tao, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute of Arizona State University explains, this two dimensional honeycomb structure of carbon atoms is exceptionally strong and versatile. Its unusual properties make it ideal for applications that are pushing the existing limits of microchips, chemical sensing instruments, biosensors, ultracapacitance devices, flexible displays and other innovations.

New evidence for ice-free summers with intermittent winter sea ice in the Arctic Ocean during the Late Cretaceous – a period of greenhouse conditions - gives a glimpse of how the Arctic is likely to respond to future global warming.

TEMPE, Ariz. – Earth's 4.5-billion-year history is filled with several turning points when temperatures changed dramatically, asteroids bombarded the planet and life forms came and disappeared. But one of the biggest moments in Earth's lifetime is the Cambrian explosion of life, roughly 540 million years ago, when complex, multi-cellular life burst out all over the planet.

U.S. municipal governments are showing leadership by voluntarily accounting for and reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their operations. They also recognize the huge potential to influence long-term reductions from the residents and businesses in their communities, according to a new report.

After studying a million years of forest evolution on Southeast Asian islands, a Texas Tech University plant biologist said human deforestation and future climate change may add insult to injury for species in an already precarious situation.

Chuck Cannon, lead investigator for the study, said his team studied how changes in climate and sea levels affected the Sundaland-area rainforest’s evolutionary history in the last million years. Many important animals, such as the orangutan, are already at unusually low population sizes because of natural changes from the last Ice Age.

The Archaea are single-celled organisms and a domain unto themselves, quite apart from the so called eukaryotes, being bacteria and higher organisms. Many species live under extreme conditions, and carry out unique biochemical processes shared neither with bacteria nor with eukaryotes. Methanogenic archaeans, for example, can produce methane gas out of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The underlying chemical reaction, a reduction, involves the cofactor known as F0 or F420 which is the tiny molecule deazaflavin.

The Amazon River originated as a transcontinental river around 11 million years ago and took its present shape approximately 2.4 million years ago. These are the most significant results of a study on two boreholes drilled in proximity of the mouth of the Amazon River by Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil.

Just about any road with a loose surface — sand or gravel or snow — develops ripples that make driving a very shaky experience. A team of physicists from Canada, France and the United Kingdom have recreated this "washboard" phenomenon in the lab with surprising results: ripples appear even when the springy suspension of the car and the rolling shape of the wheel are eliminated. The discovery may smooth the way to designing improved suspension systems that eliminate the bumpy ride.

Isotopic analysis of a bone from the 40,000 year old Tianyuan Cave skeleton (Zhoukoudian region of China near Beijing) by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and Washington University in Saint Louis has shown that this individual was a regular fish eater.

NEW YORK (JULY 7, 2009) -- The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today the discovery of a new monkey in a remote region of the Amazon in Brazil.

The monkey is related to saddleback tamarins, which include several species of monkeys known for their distinctively marked backs. The newly described distinct subspecies was first seen by scientists on a 2007 expedition into the state of Amazonas in northwestern Brazil.

Southampton scientists have demonstrated an unexpected role of iron in regulating biological production in the high-latitude North Atlantic. Their findings have important implications for our understanding of ocean-climate interactions.