Earth

U.S. Forest Service and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) scientists have found that rising levels of ozone, a greenhouse gas, may amplify the impacts of higher temperatures and reduce streamflow from forests to rivers, streams, and other water bodies. Such effects could potentially reduce water supplies available to support forest ecosystems and people in the southeastern United States.

Drawing upon more than 100 interviews with professional staff in large corporations in Melbourne, New York and Toronto, the pilot study found a strong correlation between confidence and occupational success

Participants were asked to describe their level of confidence at primary school, high school, university, and present day. Those who self-reported higher levels of confidence earlier in school earned better wages, and were promoted more quickly.

Nano-ribbons of silicon configured so the atoms resemble chicken wire could hold the key to ultrahigh density data storage and information processing systems of the future.

Philadelphia, PA – October 17, 2012—Studying the dynamics of the ocean system can greatly improve our understanding of key processes of ocean circulations, which have implications for future climate. Can applying mathematics to the research help? Dr. Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey, speaking at the 2012 SIAM Annual Meeting, thinks the answer is an emphatic "yes."

Governments and institutions should focus on developing adaption policies to address and mitigate against the negative impact of global warming, rather than putting the emphasis on carbon trading and capping greenhouse-gas emissions, argue Johannesburg-based Wits University geoscientist Dr Jasper Knight and Dr Stephan Harrison from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

The locations of the structures completed this fall were informed by data collected by WCS, the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, and identified the pronghorn's preferred migration routes and highway crossing points.

Cambridge, Mass. - October 16, 2012 - Atmospheric chemists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have found that when it comes to secondary organic material in the atmosphere, there are two distinct breeds: liquids and jellies.

Hurricane Rafael is a large hurricane and Bermuda has battened down for Rafael's battering today, Oct. 16. NOAA's GOES-14 satellite revealed Rafael's large span that covers several hundred miles and dwarfs Bermuda.

Though not often considered beyond the plasma television, small-scale microplasmas have great utility in a wide variety of applications. Recently, new developments have begun to capitalize on how these microplasmas interact with liquids in applications ranging from killing bacteria for sterilizing a surface to rapidly synthesizing nanoparticles.

Pain in the lower extremities - feet, ankles, knees and hips - contributes to both poor physical function and a reduced quality of life in obese children, according to a new study by Dr. Sharon Bout-Tabaku and colleagues, from Nationwide Children's Hospital and The Ohio State University in the US. Their work shows that obese children with lower extremity pain have worse physical function and poorer psychological health than obese children without lower extremity pain. Their findings appear online in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research®, published by Springer.

Dusty plasmas can be found in many places both in space and in the laboratory. Due to their special properties, dust acoustic waves can propagate inside these plasmas like sound waves in air, and can be studied with the naked eye or with standard video cameras. The RUB physicists Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Padma Kant Shukla and Dr. Bengt Eliasson from the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy have published a model with which they describe how large amplitude dust acoustic waves in dusty plasmas behave. The researchers report their new findings in the journal Physical Review E.

An extremely brief reversal of the geomagnetic field, climate variability and a super volcano

When it comes to physics, glass lacks transparency. No one has been able to see what's happening at the molecular level as a super-cooled liquid approaches the glass state – until now. Emory University physicists have made a movie of particle motion during this mysterious transition.

Their findings, showing how the rotation of the particles becomes decoupled from their movement through space, are being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.

In the far future, superconducting quantum bits might serve as components of high-performance computers. Today already do they help better understand the structure of solids, as is reported by researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in the Science magazine. By means of Josephson junctions, they measured the oscillations of individual atoms "tunneling" between two positions. This means that the atoms oscillated quantum mechanically. Deformation of the specimen even changed the frequency (DOI: 10.1126/science.1226487).

In a report published in Nature Physics, a group led Dr Leonid Ponomarenko and Nobel prize-winner Professor Andre Geim has assembled individual atomic layers on top of each other in a desired sequence.

The team used individual one-atom-thick crystals to construct a multilayer cake that works as a nanoscale electric transformer.

Graphene, isolated for the first time at The University of Manchester in 2004, has the potential to revolutionise diverse applications from smartphones and ultrafast broadband to drug delivery and computer chips.