Earth

Gas separation is crucial for many industrial processes including obtaining nitrogen or oxygen from air and purifying natural gas or hydrogen. Currently, the most energy efficient method for separating gases involves polymer membranes, however, most polymers either let gases pass through slowly (i.e. have low permeability) or are not selective towards one gas over another. Gas separation would be cheaper and use less energy if polymer membranes could be made both highly permeable and selective.

When it comes to camouflage, ground-nesting Japanese quail are experts. That's based on new evidence published online on January 17 in Current Biology that mother quail "know" the patterning of their own eggs and choose laying spots to hide them best.

"Not only are the eggs camouflaged, but the birds choose to lay their eggs on a substrate that maximizes camouflage," said P. George Lovell of Abertay University and the University of St Andrews. "Furthermore, the maximization seems specific to individual birds."

(Jena) The planet Earth will die – if not before, then when the Sun collapses. This is going to happen in approximately seven billion years. In the universe however the death of suns and planets is an everyday occurance and our solar system partly consists of their remnants.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—January 17, 2013— A recently released report, entitled "Social and Economic Impact Review on Neglected Tropical Diseases," highlights links between neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) and socio-economic prosperity.

Exceptionally warm spring weather in 2010 and 2012 resulted in the earliest flowering times known in 161 years of recorded history at two sites in the eastern US, according to research published January 16 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Elizabeth Ellwood of Boston University and colleagues.

For the last ten years, theoretical physicists have shown that the intense connections generated between particles as established in the quantum law of 'entanglement' may hold the key to eventual teleportation of quantum information.

Now, for the first time, researchers have worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these connections. Published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the result could conceivably take us a step closer to sci-fi style teleportation in the future, although this research is purely theoretical in nature.

A virtual heart, developed at The University of Manchester, is revealing new information about one of the world's most common heart conditions.

Researchers at the School of Physics and Astronomy used cutting edge technology to build an advanced computational model of an anatomically correct sheep's heart. It was made by taking a series of very thin slices of the heart, imaging them in 2D and then using a computer programme to render them into a 3D model.

NASA scientists say 2012 was the ninth warmest of any year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. With the exception of 1998, the nine warmest years in the 132-year record all have occurred since 2000, with 2010 and 2005 ranking as the hottest years on record.

In addition to causing smoggy skies and chronic coughs, soot – or black carbon – turns out to be the number two contributor to global warming. It's second only to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year assessment by an international panel.

The new study concludes that black carbon, the soot particles in smoke and smog, contributes about twice as much to global warming as previously estimated, even by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

HONOLULU — While the iconic Haleakalā silversword plant made a strong recovery from early 20th-century threats, it has now entered a period of substantial climate-related decline. New research published this week warns that global warming may have severe consequences for the silversword in its native habitat.

Black carbon is the second largest man-made contributor to global warming and its influence on climate has been greatly underestimated, according to the first quantitative and comprehensive analysis of this issue.

A research team involving several scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder has found an unexpected silver lining in the devastating pine beetle outbreaks ravaging the West: Such events do not harm water quality in adjacent streams as scientists had previously believed.

The climate changes depicted by climatologists up to the year 2080 will benefit most mammals that live in northern Europe's Arctic and sub-Arctic land areas today if they are able to reach their new climatic ranges. This is the conclusion drawn by ecologists at Umeå University in a recently published article in the journal Plos ONE.

Archaeologists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have discovered a cluster of 12 unusual stones in the back of a small, prehistoric rock-shelter near the town of Boquete. The cache represents the earliest material evidence of shamanistic practice in lower Central America.

Seabird activity is contributing significantly to methane and nitrous oxide emissions in the Arctic tundra, a new study shows. Methane emissions, which play an important role in the global carbon cycle, and nitrous oxide fluxes, a key element in the nutrient cycle, are predicted to increase in the Arctic and contribute to Arctic warming in the near future.