Earth

In a Policy Forum article in this week's PLOS Medicine Madhukar Pai from McGill University, Canada and colleagues discuss a framework for how point-of-care testing can be applied to infectious diseases in low- and middle-income countries. The authors note that a range of barriers exist to prevent successful use of point-of-care testing and that the availability alone of rapid or simple tests does not automatically ensure their adoption or scale-up.

A University of Central Florida research team has created the world's shortest laser pulse and in the process may have given scientists a new tool to watch quantum mechanics in action – something that has been hidden from view until now.

UCF Professor Zenghu Chang from the Department of Physics and the College of Optics and Photonics, led the effort that generated a 67-attosecond pulse of extreme ultraviolet light. The results of his research are published online under Early Posting in the journal Optics Letters.

An archaeologist from the University of Sheffield has revealed the origin and trading routes of razor-sharp stone tools 4,200 years ago in Syria.

Ancient sites and cultural heritage are under threat in Syria due to the current conflict. An interdisciplinary research team hopes this new discovery, which has major implications for understanding the world's first empire, will help to highlight the importance of protecting Syria's heritage.

HOUSTON – (Sept. 4, 2012) – Like tiny ships finding port in a storm, carbon atoms dock with the greater island of graphene in a predictable manner. But until recent research by scientists at Rice University, nobody had the tools to make that kind of prediction.

Might it one day be possible to transmit electricity from an offshore wind turbine to land-based users without any loss of current? Materials known as "high temperature" superconductors (even though they must be maintained at -140°C!), which can conduct electricity without any losses, were supposed to make this dream a reality. But over the past twenty-five years, scientists have not been able to make any progress in this area. Research being done in EPFL's Laboratory for Quantum Magnetism (LQM) could change that.

A new model allows researchers at UNESCO-IHE, Delft University of Technology and Deltares to much more accurately predict coastline erosion due to rising sea levels. It would appear that the effects of coastline erosion as a result of rising sea-level rise in the vicinity of inlets, such as river estuaries, have until now been dramatically underestimated. The scientists have published their research in the online edition of Nature Climate Change on Sept. 2, 2012.

Coastline recession

A new fungal species, called 'Hebelomagriseopruinatum', has now officially been included in the list of species. The fungus, whose name can be translated into 'the grey-dewy tear leaf', was discovered on Zealand in Denmark during a mushroom-hunting tour headed by postdoc Jacob Heilman-Clausen from the University of Copenhagen.

During a mushroom-hunting excursion in 2009, postdoc Jacob Heilman-Clausen from the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, was handed a very interesting looking fungus.

Vienna, Austria: The prevalence of smoking in Christchurch, New Zealand, increased following the 2010 earthquake, according to a new study.

The results of the study will be presented today (4 September 2012) at the European Respiratory Society's Annual Congress in Vienna.

The 7.1-magnitude Christchurch earthquake, and subsequent aftershocks, have caused a huge amount of damage and dramatically changed the social, working and living conditions for residents in the city.

Vienna, Austria: Exposure to volcanic ash can increase respiratory symptoms such as an extreme cough, or phlegm, according to a new study.

The research, which will be presented today (4 September 2012) at the European Respiratory Society's Annual Congress in Vienna, investigated the effects of living close to the Icelandic Volcano, Eyjafjallajökull.

Eyjafjallajökull erupted in April 2010 and created a huge ash cloud which spread across Europe, causing widespread disruption to air travel on the continent.

Alexandria, VA – "Warm" and "Antarctica" are not commonly used in the same sentence; however, for scientists, "warm" is a relative term. A team of researchers has discovered that, contrary to previous thinking, the Antarctic continent has experienced periods of warmth since the onset of its most recent glaciation.

The governance of Canada's massive Mackenzie River Basin holds enormous national but also global importance due to the watershed's impact on the Arctic Ocean, international migratory birds and climate stability, say experts convening a special forum on the topic.

Ocean scientists have long known that juvenile coral reef fishes use coastal seagrass and mangrove habitats as nurseries, later moving as adults onto coral reefs. But the fishes' movements, and the connections between different tropical habitats, are much more complex than previously realized, according to a study published September 3 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings have important implications for management and protection of coral reefs and other marine environments.

The Amazon basin is an important sink of carbon dioxide, but it is also a substantial source of atmospheric methane, which has 23X the short term impact of CO2 on global warming.

Tropical wetlands, including those in the Amazon, are one of the largest sources of biogenic methane and globally represent roughly 13 percent of annual emissions of the greenhouse gas. Other sources of methane include fossil fuel or biomass burning. Through two intensiveatmospheric methane sampling campaigns, Beck et al. determine the sources of Amazonian methane.

Since 1985, a state agency has constructed and continues to maintain hundreds of square kilometers of wetlands built to regulate the amount of nutrients reaching the Everglades in southern Florida. But this is proving to be ineffective in controlling concentrations of phosphorous, a key nutrient, in the surface waters of the wetland, a new study by Zapata-Rios et al. shows.

Historically, the Everglades have been a nutrient-poor environment, a characteristic that determines the delicate ecological balance and distinct flora and fauna in this region.

Reef-building coral communities in the Great Barrier Reef-the world's largest coral reef-may now be calcifying at only about half the rate that they did during the 1970s, although live coral cover may not have changed over the past 40 years, a new study finds.