Earth

Geologists at the University of Leicester have shown that an ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief 'blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years.

They have published their findings and are due to discuss them at a public lecture at the University on Wednesday June 17.

Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation of oil – including the 'hot shales' of north Africa and Arabia which constitute the world's most productive oil source rock.

RICHMOND, Va. (June 15, 2009) – A team of Virginia Commonwealth University scientists has discovered a 'magnetic superatom' – a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table – that one day may be used to create molecular electronic devices for the next generation of faster computers with larger memory storage.

By using a super-computer to virtually squeeze and heat iron-bearing minerals under conditions that would have existed when the Earth crystallized from an ocean of magma to its solid form 4.5 billion years ago, two UC Davis geochemists have produced the first picture of how different isotopes of iron were initially distributed in the solid Earth.

The discovery could usher in a wave of investigations into the evolution of Earth's mantle, a layer of material about 1,800 miles deep that extends from just beneath the planet's thin crust to its metallic core.

Better building practices for structures in hurricane-prone regions will be the focus of a paper next month in Caribbean Construction Magazine by NJIT architecture professor Rima Taher, PhD. Taher has written extensively about best building design and construction practices to reduce wind pressures on building surfaces and to resist high winds and hurricanes in residential or commercial construction.

INDIANAPOLIS –Researchers from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have developed Distributed Drug Discovery (D3), a new low-cost strategy to accelerate the discovery of drugs to treat neglected diseases such as tuberculosis, leprosy, leshmaniasis, dengue fever, and Chagas disease.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – At times in the distant past, an abrupt change in climate has been associated with a shift of seasonal monsoons to the south, a new study concludes, causing more rain to fall over the oceans than in the Earth's tropical regions, and leading to a dramatic drop in global vegetation growth.

If similar changes were to happen to the Earth's climate today as a result of global warming – as scientists believe is possible - this might lead to drier tropics, more wildfires and declines in agricultural production in some of the world's most heavily populated regions.

June 8, 2009 -- A new study evaluates expected ground motion in Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver from earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 - 9.0, providing engineers and policymakers with a new tool to build or retrofit structures to withstand seismic waves from large "subduction" earthquakes off the continent's west coast.

It's conventional wisdom in atmospheric science circles: large raindrops fall faster than smaller drops, because they're bigger and heavier. And no raindrop can fall faster than its "terminal speed"—its speed when the downward force of gravity is exactly the same as the upward air resistance.

Now two physicists from Michigan Technological University and colleagues at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National University of Mexico) have discovered that it ain't necessarily so.

Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University's Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment has found a direct relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. Matthews, together with colleagues from Victoria and the U.K., used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to show that there is a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change. These findings will be published in the next edition of Nature, to be released on June 11, 2009.

Washington, DC—Scientists have made the surprising finding that typhoons trigger slow earthquakes, at least in eastern Taiwan. Slow earthquakes are non-violent fault slippage events that take hours or days instead of a few brutal seconds to minutes to release their potent energy. The researchers discuss their data in a study published the June 11, issue of Nature.

No human is a clone of their parents but the same cannot be said for other living things. Human DNA is a combination of your mother and father but other species do things differently.

Clonal reproduction produces an individual exactly like an existing one, which would be very useful for farmers who could replicate the best of their animals or crops without the lottery of sexual reproduction. Clonal reproduction of crop species took a step closer to being realized with new research published in PLoS Biology this week.

A comprehensive investigation into the axial complex of sea urchins (Echinoidea), an internal structure with unknown function, has shown that within that group of marine invertebrates there exists a structural evolutionary interdependence of various internal organs. The research, published in Frontiers in Zoology, demonstrates that the approach of combining all structural data available on a given organ in combination with a broad taxonomic coverage can yield novel insights into the evolution of internal organ systems.

Berkeley — In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, Calif., shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground.

AUSTIN, Texas—A superconducting sheet of lead only two atoms thick, the thinnest superconducting metal layer ever created, has been developed by physicists at The University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Ken Shih and colleagues report the properties of their superconducting film in the June 5 issue of Science.

Superconductors are unique because they can maintain an electrical current indefinitely with no power source. They are used in MRI machines, particle accelerators, quantum interference devices and other applications.

A species of bacteria, isolated from sediments deep under the Pacific Ocean, could provide a powerful clean-up tool for heavy metal pollution. Writing in the current issue of the journal, Microbiology, Professor Gejiao Wang and his colleagues from Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, PR China describe how a particular strain of Brachybacterium, strain Mn32, proved to be highly effective in removing manganese from solutions, converting it into insoluble manganese oxides.