Earth

The University of Delaware's Hong Li is part of a research team looking at how adding alum as an amendment to poultry litter reduces ammonia and greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions, specifically carbon dioxide, in poultry houses.

Li partnered with researchers at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the University of Tennessee and Oklahoma State University for the project and the results of the research were recently published in the Journal of Environmental Quality.

Oxygen is indispensable to animal and plant life, but its presence in the wrong places can feed a fire and cause iron to rust.

In the fabrication of solid state lighting devices, scientists are learning, oxygen also plays a two-edged role. While oxygen can impede the effectiveness of gallium nitride (GaN), an enabling material for LEDs, small amounts of oxygen in some cases are needed to enhance the devices' optical properties. GaN doped with europium (Eu), which could provide the red color in LEDs and other displays, is one such case.

New research led by the University of Colorado Boulder indicates an ongoing loss of ice on Niwot Ridge and the adjacent Green Lakes Valley in the high mountains west of Boulder is likely to progress as the climate continues to warm.

Underground heat islands in cities have an enormous geothermal potential. Warm groundwater can be used to produce sustainable energy for heating and cooling. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now developed a new method to find underground heat islands: They estimate groundwater temperature from surface temperatures and building densities measured by satellites. This is reported in the journal "Environmental Science & Technology".

Researchers, particularly those in the medical field, have been searching for a way to combine the properties of liquid crystallinity with those of hydrogels.

Liquid crystals are characterized as having the fluidity of liquid but some of the order of a crystal so they can be oriented to have structure. They are not water-loving, in that they will dissolve in water, making them less than ideal candidates for use inside the body.

Hydrogels, however, are water-loving but they lack the order to orient them into specific shapes.

Tropical Storm Pali, an out-of-season storm for the Central Pacific Ocean, continues to thrive about 8 degrees latitude north of the Equator. A recent infrared image from the GOES-West satellite showed that Pali a small cyclone.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Research teams have evaluated the major 7.8 magnitude subduction zone earthquake in Gorkha, Nepal, in April 2015, and identified characteristics that may be of special relevance to the future of the Pacific Northwest.

Most striking was the enormous number and severity of landslides.

Many people understand the damage that can be caused to structures, roads, bridges and utilities by ground shaking in these long-lasting types of earthquakes, such as the one that's anticipated on the Cascadia Subduction Zone between northern California and British Columbia.

• Giant icebergs leave trail of carbon sequestration in their wake -- a month after they have passed
• Geographers analysed 175 satellite images of ocean colour which is an indicator of phytoplankton productivity at the ocean's surfaceGiant icebergs are responsible for storing up to 20 per cent of carbon in the Southern Ocean, a new study has found.

• 'Kink' in fault explains long-term growth of highest mountains in years between earthquakes
• Satellite technology shows Himalayas subsided by up to 60cm after April 2015 disaster
• Rupture in fault line stopped 11km below Kathmandu, suggesting earthquake hazard remains

An international team of scientists has shed new light on the earthquake that devastated Nepal in April 2015, killing more than 8,000 people.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Traditional light bulbs, thought to be well on their way to oblivion, may receive a reprieve thanks to a technological breakthrough.

Incandescent lighting and its warm, familiar glow is well over a century old yet survives virtually unchanged in homes around the world. That is changing fast, however, as regulations aimed at improving energy efficiency are phasing out the old bulbs in favor of more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) and newer light-emitting diode bulbs (LEDs).

Imagine that you are a female student and give the exact same answer to a physics exam question as one of your male classmates, but you receive a significantly poorer grade. This is precisely what happens on a regular basis, as concluded in a study by Sarah Hofer, a researcher in the group led by ETH professor Elsbeth Stern.

Just a decade or two ago, NMR and MS measurements were more difficult to carry out, and the instruments were primarily operated by highly qualified, dedicated personnel. Since that time the paradigm has changed dramatically.

Sophia Antipolis, 11 January 2016: A new classification of coronary congenital diseases is set to help surgeons identify secondary defects in the operating theatre. The scheme is outlined in a novel European Society of Cardiology (ESC) position paper published today in Cardiovascular Research.1 Clinical cardiologists will also know what to look for on cardiovascular images.

"It can be difficult to spot further defects in the stressful environment of the operating theatre."

Physicists around the world were puzzled recently when an unusual bump appeared in the signal of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, causing them to wonder if it was a new particle previously unknown, or perhaps even two new particles. The collision cannot be explained by the Standard Model, the theoretical foundation of particle physics.

Mechanical properties of nanomaterials can be altered due to the application of voltage, University of Wyoming researchers have discovered.

The researchers, led by TeYu Chien, a UW assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, determined that the electric field is responsible for alterating the fracture toughness of nanomaterials, which are used in state-of-the-art electronic devices. It is the first observed evidence that the electric field changes the fracture toughness at a nanometer scale.