Earth

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5, 2009 — Millions of homes in rural areas of Far Eastern countries are heated by charcoal burned on small, hibachi-style portable grills. Scientists in Japan are now reporting development of an improved "biomass charcoal combustion heater" that they say could open a new era in sustainable and ultra-high efficiency home heating.

Their study was published in ACS' Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, a bi-weekly journal.

VIRGINIA KEY, Fla. — Seawater is a complex, dynamic mixture of dissolved minerals, salts, and organic materials that despite scientists best efforts, presents difficulties in measuring its potential to contain and disperse energy. Like the water itself, the calculations scientists employ to measure seawater are fluid, undergoing significant revisions and clarifications over the years as research techniques and instrumentation continues to evolve.

MELBOURNE, FLA.—Climate change is about to cause a major upheaval in the shallow marine waters of Antarctica. Predatory crabs are poised to return to warming Antarctic waters and disrupt the primeval marine communities.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – An international research team of scientists from UC Riverside, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions has found the oldest evidence for animals in the fossil record.

The researchers examined sedimentary rocks in south Oman, and found an anomalously high amount of steroids that date back to 635 million years ago, to around the end of the last ice age. The steroids are produced by sponges – one of the simplest forms of multicellular animals.

PASADENA, Calif.--Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an international team of collaborators have returned from a month-long deep-sea voyage to a marine reserve near Tasmania, Australia, that not only netted coral-reef samples likely to provide insight into the impact of climate change on the world's oceans, but also brought to light at least three never-before-seen species of sea life.

Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a new study suggests. This change might take a toll on public health.

A researcher at North Carolina State University is tracking the movement of the Redbay Ambrosia beetle, an invasive insect that, if it spreads to southeast Florida, may severely affect the production of avocados, a $15 million to $30 million industry in the state.

Tubeworms have been around for millions of years and the fossil record is rich with their distinctive imprints. But a discovery made by U of C scientists found that what previous researchers had labeled as tubeworms in a formation near Denver, Colorado, are actually 70 million-year-old escape hatches for methane.

Sixty million years before Jennifer Lopez starred in the film "Anaconda," the world's biggest snake slithered around northern South America. Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History, unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species named Titanoboa cerrejonensis.

Cardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicist.

Craig Hogan, a physicist at Fermilab Centre for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois is convinced that he has found proof in the data of the gravitational wave detector GEO600 of a holographic Universe – and that his ideas could explain mysterious noise in the detector data that has not been explained so far.

The snow is thawing, the first crocuses are fighting their way through the cold earth into the daylight and hay fever sufferers are already pulling out their handkerchiefs. A new type of measuring station will automatically determine the pollen count and thus improve the forecast.

The Monsoon and Environment Research Group of Peking University submitted a report to Chinese Science Bulletin, recently, showed that regional summer monsoon rainfall in China can be predicted by 1-2 seasons ahead by using the signals of the sea surface temperature anomaly (SSTA) and the subsurface temperature anomaly (STA) in the central equatorial Pacific (CEP). Several new facts have been revealed as follows.

Filling our fuel tanks with cellulosic ethanol instead of gasoline or corn-based ethanol may be even better for our health and the environment than previously recognized, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.

The study finds that cellulosic ethanol has fewer negative effects on human health because it emits smaller amounts of fine particulate matter, an especially harmful component of air pollution. Earlier work showed that cellulosic ethanol and other next-generation biofuels also emit lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Mountain pine beetles devastating lodgepole pine stands across the West might best be kept in check with aerial application of flakes containing a natural substance used in herbal teas that the insects release to avoid overcrowding host trees, according to a team of scientists.

Get ready to send the biology textbooks back to the printer. In a new paper published in Nature, Benjamin Van Mooy, a geochemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and his colleagues report that microscopic plants growing in the Sargasso Sea have come up with a completely unexpected way of building their cells.