Earth

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18, 2012 — For everyone with holiday visions of snowflakes dancing in their heads, the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, today issued a video explaining how dust, water, cold and air currents collaborate to form these symbols of the season. It's all there in an episode of Bytesize Science, the award-winning video series produced by the ACS Office of Public Affairs at www.BytesizeScience.com.

Research carried out at the University of Sheffield has revealed intriguing parallels between modern day and Bronze-Age Syria as the Mesopotamian region underwent urban decline, government collapse, and drought.

Dr Ellery Frahm from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology made the discoveries by studying stone tools of obsidian, razor-sharp volcanic glass, crafted in the region about 4,200 years ago.

ANN ARBOR – A comprehensive map three years in the making is telling the story of humans' impact on the Great Lakes, identifying how "environmental stressors" stretching from Minnesota to Ontario are shaping the future of an ecosystem that contains 20 percent of the world's fresh water.

ITHACA, N.Y. – Global travel and climate warming could be creating the right conditions for outbreaks of a new virus in this country, according to a new Cornell University computer model.

Highlights, including authors and their institutions

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recentlypublished in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

In this release:

By fitting a "smart" mobile phone with magnifying optics, bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley created a real "cell" phone, a diagnostic-quality microscope that can be used by clinics in developing countries and inside — and outside — American biology classrooms, according to Eva M. Schmid, PhD, who described the development of CellScope at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting, Dec. 17, in San Francisco.

From extreme drought to super storms, many wonder what the future holds for the climate of the eastern United States. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does away with the guessing.

Results show the region will be hotter and wetter.

Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant, developed precise scales of cities which act as a climate crystal ball seeing high resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.

In the period of atmospheric nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s significant amounts of uranium-236 were distributed world-wide. Despite this, uranium-236 has mostly eluded detection and clear attribution to this source. A team of three researchers based in Austria and Australia lead by Stephan Winkler have identified the bomb-pulse of this isotope in corals from the Caribbean Sea. Uranium is readily dissolved in seawater, and therefore is carried by ocean currents. This makes uranium-236 and ideal tool for investigating ocean currents. Stephan R.

AMHERST, Mass. – Though it seems like an oxymoron, Arctic hurricanes happen, complete with a central "eye," extreme low barometric pressure and towering 30-foot waves that can sink small ships and coat metal platforms with thick ice, threatening oil and gas exploration. Now climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and in England report the first conclusive evidence that Arctic hurricanes, also known as polar lows, play a significant role in driving ocean water circulation and climate.

This is a joint press release from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

Limiting climate change to target levels will become much more difficult to achieve, and more expensive, if action is not taken soon, according to a new analysis from IIASA, ETH Zurich, and NCAR.

Intense but small-scale polar storms could make a big difference to climate predictions according to new research from the University of East Anglia and the University of Massachusetts.

Difficult-to-forecast polar mesoscale storms occur frequently over the polar seas, however they are missing in most climate models.

Research published today in Nature Geoscience shows that their inclusion could paint a different picture of climate change in years to come.

Physicists at the University of Calgary and at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo have published new research in Nature Physics which builds on the original ideas of Einstein and adds a new ingredient: a third entangled particle.

HOUSTON – (Dec. 14, 2012) – A new material structure predicted at Rice University offers the tantalizing possibility of a signal path smaller than the nanowires for advanced electronics now under development at Rice and elsewhere.

Theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and postdoctoral fellow Xiaolong Zou were investigating the atomic-scale properties of two-dimensional materials when they found to their surprise that a particular formation, a grain boundary in metal disulfides, creates a metallic – and therefore conducting – path only a fraction of a nanometer wide.

The mass ratio of protons and electrons is deemed to be a universal constant. And rightly so, as the latest radio-astronomy observations of a distant galaxy have shown. Scientists at the VU University of Amsterdam and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn used the 100-metre radio telescope in Effelsberg to measure absorption lines of the methanol molecule at a number of characteristic frequencies. The researchers analysed the spectrum of the simplest of all the alcohols in a very distant galaxy.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– While some theoretical physicists make predictions about astrophysics and the behavior of stars and galaxies, others work in the realm of the very small, which includes quantum physics. Such is the case at UC Santa Barbara, where theoretical physicists at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) cover the range of questions in physics.