Earth

Electron microscopy at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is providing unprecedented views of the individual atoms in graphene, offering scientists a chance to unlock the material's full potential for uses from engine combustion to consumer electronics.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers are making key contributions to a physics experiment that will look for one of nature's most elusive particles, "dark matter," using a tank nearly a mile underground beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota.

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Pollution from fossil fuel burning and forest fires reaches all the way to the Arctic, even though it should decay long before it travels that far. Now, lab research can explain how pollution makes its lofty journey: rather than ride on the surface of airborne particles, pollutants snuggle inside, protected from the elements on the way. The results will help scientists improve atmospheric air-quality and pollution transport models.

The recent storms that have battered settlements on the east coast of America may have been much more frequent in the region 450 million years ago, according to scientists.

New research pinpointing the positions of the Equator and the landmasses of the USA, Canada and Greenland, during the Ordovician Period 450 million years ago, indicates that the equator ran down the western side of North America with a hurricane belt to the east.

The hurricane belt would have affected an area covering modern day New York State, New Jersey and most of the eastern seaboard of the USA.

Putnam Valley, NY. (Nov. 15, 2012) – Researchers in Taiwan have developed a "safe, feasible and robust co-culture system" supplied by human umbilical cord mensenchymal stem cells (HUCMSCs) to feed the sustained culture used for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) expansion prior to cell transplantation. The co-culture, said the researchers, "appears to eliminate the most feared characteristic of transplanted hESCs," which is their propensity to form tumors.

Researchers uncover some good news for BC's troubled salmon populations

A University of Alberta led research team has some positive news for British Columbia's pink salmon populations, and the salmon farming industry that has struggled to protect both captive and wild salmon from sea lice infestations.

There has long been concern that concentrations of sea lice in BC's fish farming pens spread to wild fish stock in surrounding waters.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives many of the catastrophic climate events that occur from one year to the next: floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes.

However, climate scientists do not yet know how ENSO will respond to climate change. A new multi-century reconstruction of ENSO variability, based on fossil corals from Papua New Guinea, reveals a century-long decline in the number of El Niño events starting in the mid-1500s.

This study by Jose Luis Antinao and Eric McDonald assesses the hypothesis that a climatically induced decrease in vegetation density on arid region hillslopes is a major factor behind erosion, sediment transport, and aggradation (sedimentation) downstream.

This linkage is often used to explain sedimentation in alluvial fans during the Late Pleistocene Holocene period (8 to 14-thousand years ago) in the U.S. Southwest deserts. Antinao and McDonald compiled paleo-botanical and alluvial fan sedimentation histories during this period in the Mojave and northern Sonoran deserts.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The human nose has millions of olfactory neurons grouped into hundreds of different neuron types. Each of these neuron types expresses only one odorant receptor, and all neurons expressing the same odorant receptor plug into one region in the brain, an organization that allows for specific odors to be sensed.

The Walker circulation determines much of the tropical Indo-Pacific climate and has a global impact as seen in the floods and droughts spawned by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Meteorological observations over the last 60 years show this atmospheric circulation has slowed: the trade winds have weakened and rainfall has shifted eastward toward the central Pacific.

The immediate cause of this slowdown has puzzled climate scientists. They could not reproduce it in their atmospheric models, questioning the ability of climate models to simulate gradual climate change.

A new study has revealed a rapid response between global temperature and ice volume/sea-level, which could lead to sea-levels rising by over one metre.

During the last few million years, global ice-volume variability has been one of the main feedback mechanisms in climate change, because of the strong reflective properties of large ice sheets. Ice volume changes in ancient times can be reconstructed from sea-level records. However, detailed assessment of the role of ice volume in climate change is hindered by inadequacies in sea-level records and/or their timescales.

A new surveying technique developed at The University of Nottingham is giving geologists their first detailed picture of how ground movement associated with historical mining is changing the face of our landscape.

The new development by engineers at the University has revealed a more complete map of subsidence and uplift caused by the settlement of old mines in the East Midlands and other areas of the country and has shown that small movements in the landscape are bound by natural fault lines and mining blocks.

The chrome yellow pigment that renowned post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh favored in priceless masterpieces like Sunflowers, the Yellow House and Wheatfield with Crows is especially sensitive to certain types of light and should be protected to prevent darkening. That's the conclusion of a series of studies in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry, which could help preserve masterpieces by van Gogh and contemporaries like Gauguin, Cézanne and others.

Scientists are reporting a simple way to improve the sensitivity of the test often used to detect traces of explosives on the hands, carry-ons and other possessions of passengers at airport security screening stations. Their report appears in ACS' The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.