Earth

Sydney: Despite a worldwide obsession with diets and fitness regimes, many health professionals cannot correctly answer the question of where body fat goes when people lose weight, a UNSW Australia study shows.

The most common misconception among doctors, dieticians and personal trainers is that the missing mass has been converted into energy or heat.

"There is surprising ignorance and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss," says Professor Andrew Brown, head of the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences.

The rate at which carbon emissions warmed Earth's climate almost 56 million years ago resembles modern, human-caused global warming much more than previously believed, but involved two pulses of carbon to the atmosphere, researchers have found.

The findings mean that the so-called Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM, can provide clues to the future of modern climate change.

The good news: Earth and most species survived.

The remnants of Tropical Cyclone Bakung continue to linger in the Southern Indian Ocean, and NOAA-NASA's Suomi NPP (Suomi NPP) satellite is one satellite keeping an eye on the storm for possible re-development.

On Dec. 16, the remnant low pressure area formerly known as Bakung was centered near 7.4 south longitude and 83.8 east latitude. That's about 670 nautical miles (771 miles/1,241 km) east of the coral atoll known as Diego Garcia. The atoll is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

AMES, Iowa - As a glacier's sliding speed increases, the bed beneath the glacier can grow slipperier, according to laboratory experiments conducted by Iowa State University glaciologists.

They say including this effect in efforts to calculate future increases in glacier speeds could improve predictions of ice volume lost to the oceans and the rate of sea-level rise.

Unlike in mathematics, it is rare to have exact solutions to physics problems.

"When they do present themselves, they are an opportunity to test the approximation schemes (algorithms) that are used to make progress in modern physics," said Michael Strickland, Ph.D., associate professor of physics at Kent State University.

ITHACA, N.Y. - In the fight against global warming, carbon capture - chemically trapping carbon dioxide before it releases into the atmosphere - is gaining momentum, but standard methods are plagued by toxicity, corrosiveness and inefficiency. Using a bag of chemistry tricks, Cornell materials scientists have invented low-toxicity, highly effective carbon-trapping "sponges" that could lead to increased use of the technology.

Washington, D.C.--New work from Carnegie's Ivan Naumov and Russell Hemley delves into the chemistry underlying some surprising recent observations about hydrogen, and reveals remarkable parallels between hydrogen and graphene under extreme pressures. Their work is the cover story in the December issue of Accounts of Chemical Research.

The mortality of larval Pacific oysters in Northwest hatcheries has been linked to ocean acidification. Yet the rate of increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decrease of pH in near-shore waters have been questioned as being severe enough to cause the die-offs.

Now, a new study of Pacific oyster and Mediterranean mussel larvae found that the earliest larval stages are sensitive to saturation state, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) or pH (acidity) per se.

ATLANTA--The Paleolithic diet, or caveman diet, a weight-loss craze in which people emulate the diet of plants and animals eaten by early humans during the Stone Age, gives modern calorie-counters great freedom because those ancestral diets likely differed substantially over time and space, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Kent State University.

Their findings are published in The Quarterly Review of Biology.

ATLANTA--The Paleolithic diet, or caveman diet, a weight-loss craze in which people emulate the diet of plants and animals eaten by early humans during the Stone Age, gives modern calorie-counters great freedom because those ancestral diets likely differed substantially over time and space, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Kent State University.

Their findings are published in The Quarterly Review of Biology.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second-largest body of ice on Earth. It covers an area about five times the size of New York State and Kansas combined, and if it melts completely, oceans could rise by 20 feet. Coastal communities from Florida to Bangladesh would suffer extensive damage.

Now, a new study is revealing just how little we understand this northern behemoth.

The largest trees in a forest may command the most attention, but the smallest seedlings and youngest saplings are the ones that are most critical to the composition and diversity of the forest overall. While many people gaze up into the forest canopy, renowned scientist Joseph Connell has spent much of his career looking down quite closely at the forest understory.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15, 2014 -- It's something your mother told you time and time again at the dinner table: "Eat your carrots, they'll help you see better!" So was she right? This week, Reactions answers the question with the help of chemist Chad Jones, Ph.D., host of the award-winning Collapsed Wave Function podcast. Check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3DNScZYvYY.

Researchers in Spain have discovered that if lead atoms are intercalated on a graphene sheet, a powerful magnetic field is generated by the interaction of the electrons' spin with their orbital movement. This property could have implications in spintronics, an emerging technology promoted by the European Union to create advanced computational systems.

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 15, 2014 - The rate at which carbon emissions warmed Earth's climate almost 56 million years ago resembles modern, human-caused global warming much more than previously believed, but involved two pulses of carbon to the atmosphere, University of Utah researchers and their colleagues found.