Earth

In the world of single atoms and molecules governed by chaotic fluctuations, is the spontaneous formation of Turing patterns possible - the same ones that are responsible for the irregular yet periodic shapes of the stripes on zebras' bodies? A Polish-Danish team of physicists has for the first time demonstrated that such a process can not only occur, but can also be used for potentially very interesting applications.

Rocks within plate boundary scale fault zones become fragmented and altered over the earthquake cycle. They both record and influence the earthquake process. In this new open-access study published in Lithosphere on 4 Feb., Virginia Toy and colleagues document fault rocks surrounding New Zealand's active Alpine Fault, which has very high probability of generating a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake in the near future.

Log on to Twitter, Facebook or other social media and you will find that much of the content shared with you comes in the form of images, not just words. Those images can convey a lot more than a sentence might, and will often provoke emotions in the viewer.

Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science at the University of Rochester, in collaboration with researchers at Adobe Research has come up with a more accurate way than currently possible to train computers to be able to digest data that comes in the form of images.

A team of US scientists have found "beautifully preserved" 15 million-year-old thin protein sheets in fossil shells from southern Maryland. Their findings are published in the inaugural issue of Geochemical Perspectives Letters, the new peer-reviewed journal of the European Association of Geochemistry.

Members of IFR's National Collection of Yeast Cultures (NCYC) have joined forces with computer scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) to validate novel approaches to constructing a tree of life.

Finding evolutionary trees that best describe how species or sub-species are related to one another is a vital part of NCYC's research, underpinning our understanding of the collection and how we may exploit it in biological and bioindustrial projects.

A novel class of materials that enable a safer, cheaper, and more energy-efficient process for removing greenhouse gas from power plant emissions has been developed by a multi-institution team of researchers. The approach could be an important advance in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

Vast ranges of volcanoes hidden under the oceans are presumed by scientists to be the gentle giants of the planet, oozing lava at slow, steady rates along mid-ocean ridges. But a new study shows that they flare up on strikingly regular cycles, ranging from two weeks to 100,000 years--and, that they erupt almost exclusively during the first six months of each year.

These new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture a rare occurrence as three of Jupiter's largest moons parading across the giant gas planet's banded face. Hubble took a string of images of the event which show the three satellites -- Europa, Callisto and Io -- in action.

Edible oyster mushrooms have an intriguing secret: they eat spiders and roundworms. And they do so using proteins that can punch their way into cells, leaving tidy but deadly holes. It's a trick that our immune cells also use to protect us, destroying infected cells, cancerous cells, and bacteria.

Termites might not top the list of humanity's favorite insects, but new research suggests that their large dirt mounds are crucial to stopping the spread of deserts into semi-arid ecosystems and agricultural lands. The results not only suggest that termite mounds could make these areas more resilient to climate change than previously thought, but could also inspire a change in how scientists determine the possible effects of climate change on ecosystems.

Muscles necessary for breathing need a greater amount of oxygen in women than in men, according to a study published today in The Journal of Physiology.

Researchers found that at submaximal and maximal exercise intensities, respiratory muscles (muscles necessary for breathing, such as the diaphragm and muscles surrounding the ribcage) consume a greater amount of oxygen in women compared with men. This means that women use more energy when breathing because a significantly greater part of total oxygen is directed to the respiratory muscles.

Crops and other plants are constantly faced with adverse environmental conditions, such as rising temperatures (2014 was the warmest year on record) and lessening fresh water supplies, which lower yield and cost farmers billions of dollars annually.

Bariatric surgery improves life expectancy for many obese diabetic patients, but it may cut life expectancy for patients who are super obese with very high body mass indexes, according to a University of Cincinnati researcher.

Small magnetic whirls may revolutionize future data storage and information processing if they can be moved rapidly and reliably in small structures. A team of scientists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and TU Berlin, together with colleagues from the Netherlands and Switzerland, has now been able to investigate the dynamics of these whirls experimentally. The skyrmions, as these tiny whirls are called after the British nuclear physicist Tony Skyrme, follow a complex trajectory and even continue to move after the external excitation is switched off.

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 5, 2015 - The conservation value of growing coffee under trees instead of on open farms is well known, but hasn't been studied much in Africa. So a University of Utah-led research team studied birds in the Ethiopian home of Arabica coffee and found that "shade coffee" farms are good for birds, but some species do best in forest.