Earth

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When you look at a gift-wrapped present, the basic properties of the wrapping paper — say, its colors and texture — are not generally changed by the nature of the gift inside.

A new discovery should make the alternative fuel butanol more attractive to the biofuel industry. University of Illinois scientist Hao Feng has found a way around the bottleneck that has frustrated producers in the past and could significantly reduce the cost of the energy involved in making it as well.

Scientists taking advantage of the versatility and new capabilities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, have observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons, from the seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons that permeated the early universe some 14 billion years ago.

Soil microbes are impulsive. So much so that they help plants face the challenges of a rapidly changing climate.

Ariz. – Earthquakes are among the most destructive and common of geologic phenomena. Several million earthquakes are estimated to occur worldwide each year (the vast majority are too small to feel, but their motions can be measured by arrays of seismometers). Historically, most of Arizona has experienced low levels of recorded seismicity, with infrequent moderate and large earthquakes in the state.

A fractured skull and a thigh bone hacked in half -- finds of damaged human bones along with axes, spears, clubs and shields confirm that the bog at Alken Enge was the site of violent conflict

'It's clear that this must have been a quite far-reaching and dramatic event that must have had profound effect on the society of the time,' explains Project Manager Mads Kähler Holst, professor of archaeology at Aarhus University.

Emissions from shipping have sharply decreased in EU ports, and politicians are giving thanks to an EU policy which limits sulfur content in fuels for ships at berth or at anchor in ports rather than wrecking their economy, which has led to fewer goods being shipped at all.

During serious flooding around Manila and major rice-growing across Luzon in the Philippines, some good news has emerged for rice farmers – Submarino rice – rice that can survive around 2 weeks of being under water.

Rice is unique because it can grow well in wet conditions where other crops cannot, but if it is covered with water completely it can die, leaving flooded farmers bereft of income.

When a hurricane's path carries it over large areas of fresh water, it will potentially intensify 50 percent faster than those that do not pass over such regions, meaning it has greater potential to become a stronger storm and be more devastating, according to a study co-written by a group of researchers at Texas A&M University.

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Scientists have found a way to replace up to 50 per cent of chocolate's fat content with fruit juice.

University of Warwick chemists have taken out much of the cocoa butter and milk fats that go into chocolate bars, substituting them with tiny droplets of juice measuring under 30 microns in diameter.

They infused orange and cranberry juice into milk, dark and white chocolate using what is known as a Pickering emulsion.

Crucially, the clever chemistry does not take away the chocolatey 'mouth-feel' given by the fatty ingredients.

TEMPE, Ariz. – According to the United Nations' 2011 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, global urban population is expected to gain more than 2.5 billion new inhabitants through 2050. Such sharp increases in the number of urban dwellers will require considerable conversion of natural to urban landscapes, resulting in newly developing and expanding megapolitan areas. Could climate impacts arising from built environment growth pose additional concerns for urban residents also expected to deal with impacts resulting from global climate change?

As the world's currently developed oil reserves dwindle,and activist insistence that oil should not be extracted in new places like ANWR, natural gas has become an increasingly important energy source. The primary component of natural gas is methane, which has the advantage of releasing less carbon dioxide when it's burned than do many other hydrocarbon fuels - but there is a catch.

So-called "superheavy" elements owe their very existence exclusively to shell effects within the atomic nucleus. Without this stabilization they would disintegrate in a split second due to the strong repulsion between their many protons. The constituents of an atomic nucleus, the protons and neutrons, organize themselves in shells. Certain "magic" configurations with completely filled shells render the protons and neutrons to be more strongly bound together.

How strong can earthquakes in Germany be? Where in Europa are the earthquake activities concentrated? These questions are the basis for risk assessments and become relevant when it comes to the safety of buildings or the generation of tsunami.For the first time, scientists of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have succeeded in setting up a harmonized catalogue of earthquakes for Europe and the Mediterranean for the last thousand years. This catalogue consists of about 45000 earthquakes, reported in the latest issue of the „Journal of Seismology".