Earth

An international research team, including Professor Rajeev Ahuja's research group at Uppsala University, has shown that small additions of potassium drastically improve the hydrogen-storage properties of certain types of hydrogen compounds. The findings are published in the Web edition of Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Climate change will cause some of Australia's potential weeds to move south by up to 1000km, according to a report by scientists at CSIRO's Climate Adaptation Flagship.

Weeds cost Australia more than $4 billion a year either in control or lost production and cause serious damage to the environment.

In an address today in Perth to the GREENHOUSE 09 conference on climate change, CSIRO researcher, Dr John Scott, said, however, that those cost estimates were only based on the damage caused by weeds known to be active in Australia.

DURHAM, N.C. – A new study of storm-related deaths from a super cyclone that hit the eastern coast of India in 1999 finds that villages shielded from the storm surge by mangrove forests experienced significantly fewer deaths than villages that were less protected.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Delhi and Duke University, analyzed deaths in 409 villages in the poor, mostly rural Kendrapada District of the Indian state of Orissa, just north of the cyclone's landfall.

A one-story masonry structure survived two days of intense earthquake jolts after engineering researchers at the University of California, San Diego put it to the test. The series of tests, performed at UC San Diego's Englekirk Structural Engineering Center, which has the largest outdoor shake table in the world. The tests were part of a collaborative research project between the University of Texas at Austin, UC San Diego, Washington State University, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

DURHAM, N.C. -- A Duke University professor and his graduate student have discovered a universal principle that unites the curious interplay of light and shadow on the surface of your morning coffee with the way gravity magnifies and distorts light from distant galaxies.

They think scientists will be able to use violations of this principle to map unseen clumps of dark matter in the universe.

Light rays naturally reflect off a curve like the inside surface of a coffee cup in a curving, ivy leaf pattern that comes to a point in the center and is brightest along its edge.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Roundup Ready crops have made weed control much easier for farmers, but a new study shows their reliance on the technology may be weakening the herbicide's ability to control weeds.

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An invasion of soybean aphids poses a problem for soybean farmers requiring application of pesticides, but a team of Penn State entomologists thinks a careful choice of nitrogen-fixing bacteria may provide protection against the sucking insects.

Soybeans are legumes, plants that can have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria -- rhizobia -- and therefore do not need additional nitrogen fertilizer. Each type of legume -- peas, beans, lentils, alfalfa -- have their own rhizobia.

Troy, N.Y. – The speed at which heat moves between two materials touching each other is a potent indicator of how strongly they are bonded to each other, according to a new study by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Additionally, the study shows that this flow of heat from one material to another, in this case one solid and one liquid, can be dramatically altered by "painting" a thin atomic layer between materials. Changing the interface fundamentally changes the way the materials interact.

KINGSTON, R.I. – April 14, 2009 – Most fish rely primarily on their vision to find prey to feed upon, but a University of Rhode Island biologist and her colleagues have demonstrated that a group of African cichlids feeds by using its lateral line sensory system to detect minute vibrations made by prey hidden in the sediments.

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A University of Toronto research team from the Department of Chemistry has discovered useful "green" catalysts made from iron that might replace the much more expensive and toxic platinum metals typically used in industrial chemical processes to produce drugs, fragrances and flavours.

Propagation of earthquake waves within the Earth is not uniform. Experiments indicate that the velocity of shear waves (s-waves) in Earth's lower mantle between 660 and 2900 km depth is strongly dependent on the orientation of ferropericlase. In the latest issue of "Science" (Vol. 325, 10.04.2009), researchers from the German Research Center for Geosciences GFZ, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of Bayreuth, and Arizona State University report unexpected properties of ferropericlase, which is presumably the second most abundant mineral of the lower mantle.