Earth

GAINESVILLE, FL—Researchers at the University of Florida have introduced 'Delicious', a new muscadine grape cultivar. 'Delicious' ripens early, produces high yields, and is disease-resistant. The black fruit features exceptional taste and texture with an edible skin, making it well-suited for fresh fruit consumption and the potential for wine production. The name 'Delicious' was selected based on the comments of vineyard visitors who sampled the fruit.

LIVERMORE, Calif. - The most abundant material on Earth exhibits some unusual chemical properties when placed under extreme conditions.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have shown that water, in hot dense environments, plays an unexpected role in catalyzing complex explosive reactions. A catalyst is a compound that speeds chemical reactions without being consumed. Platinum and enzymes are common catalysts. But water rarely, if ever, acts as a catalyst under ordinary conditions.

Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere?

Answering those questions will not be easy.

Berlin, 19 March 2009 – World Water Day on Sunday, 22 March aims to raise public awareness of the increasing scarcity of clean drinking water on our planet. In a densely populated world, droughts and floods are causing more damage than ever before.

Portland, Ore. March 19, 2009. No single decision-support system exists for selecting alternatives for postfire management. That thesis is what a recently released report on management after fire hinges upon. The publication, Effects of Timber Harvest Following Wildfire in Western North America, tells us that the type of forest landscape determines the ways fire and logging may change an area after a wildfire. The authors, however, hope that public land managers will use the publication to evaluate postfire management options.

By combining data from 48 studies of coral reefs from around the Caribbean, researchers have found that fish densities that have been stable for decades have given way to significant declines since 1995. The study appears online on March 19th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

Two decades after the Exxon Valdez oil spill devastated a vast stretch of the Alaskan coast, governments and industry in the Arctic would be unable to effectively manage a large oil spill, according to a new report by World Wildlife Fund. As the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill approaches on March 24, WWF renewed its call for a time-out on new offshore oil development in the Arctic until technologies improve to ensure adequate clean-up of an oil spill. WWF is also calling on the Obama Administration to permanently protect Alaska's fish-rich Bristol Bay from drilling.

Berkeley -- A newly-laid, 32-mile underwater cable finally links the state's only seafloor seismic station with the University of California, Berkeley's seismic network, merging real-time data from west of the San Andreas fault with data from 31 other land stations sprinkled around Northern and Central California.

Researchers today worry about the collapse of West Antarctic ice shelves and loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but little is known about the past movements of this ice. Now climatologists from Penn State and the University of Massachusetts have modeled the past 5 million years of the West Antarctic ice sheet and found the ice expanse changes rapidly and is most influenced by ocean temperatures near the continent.

A five-nation scientific team has published new evidence that even a slight rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that drives global warming, affects the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The massive WAIS covers the continent on the Pacific side of the Transantarctic Mountains. Any substantial melting of the ice sheet would cause a rise in global sea levels.

Earth's crust melts easier than previously thought, scientists have discovered.

In a paper published in this week's issue of the journal Nature, geologists report results of a study of how well rocks conduct heat at different temperatures. They found that as rocks get hotter in Earth's crust, they become better insulators and poorer conductors.

The findings provide insights into how magmas are formed, the scientists say, and will lead to better models of continental collision and the formation of mountain belts.

Burnaby, B.C. – March 18, 2009 – In Canada, campaign spending limits for candidates during a federal election are stipulated by the Canada Elections Act. A study recently published in the Canadian Journal of Economics uses these spending limits to evaluate the impact of candidate spending on voting outcomes. Results show that higher spending by candidates is found to lead to better chance of the candidate winning the election, and that spending limits are good for democracy.

CIUDAD OBREGÓN, MEXICO (17 March 2009)— The world's leading wheat experts from Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas—invited to Mexico by Nobel Prize Winner Norman Borlaug—today reported significant progress in developing new varieties of wheat capable of resisting a virulent form of an old plant disease that threatens wheat production worldwide.

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University's Cliff I. Davidson, Joseph B. Kadane and Nanjun Chu have found that polluted air in the highly populated East End areas of Pittsburgh are more affected by major sources to the city's southeast than previously thought.

Because more than three-quarters of particulate matter found in the city originates from outside the Pittsburgh urban area — mainly to the west — the importance of certain air quality sources had not been quantified in the past.

The Earth explorer satellite GOCE (Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer), built by the European Space Agency ESA, was successfully launched today at 15:21 GMT from the Russian Cosmodrome Plesetsk. GOCE is the first satellite mission within the framework of the Living Planet Programme of ESA and will map Earth's gravity field in unprecedented detail.