Earth

By hightailing it to nearby ponds and shallow waterways, frogs and salamanders have – until now – had a way to evade exotic trout introduced to the West's high-mountain lakes for recreational fishing.

Australia's coastline has been struck by up to 145 possible tsunamis since prehistoric times, causing deaths previously unreported in the scientific literature, a UNSW Australia study has revealed.

The largest recorded inundation event in Australia was caused by an earthquake off Java in Indonesia on 17 July 2006, which led to a tsunami that reached up to 7.9 metres above sea level on land at Steep Point in Western Australia.

Aquatic algae can sense an unexpectedly wide range of color, allowing them to sense and adapt to changing light conditions in lakes and oceans. The study by researchers at UC Davis was published earlier this year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Weather systems that bring rainstorms to many drought-prone areas of northern Africa, carry Saharan dust across the ocean and seed Atlantic hurricanes could grow stronger as a result of human-caused climate change, a new analysis by Stanford scientists suggests.

Known as African easterly waves, or AEWs, these weather systems form above northern Africa during the summer season and travel east to west, toward the Atlantic Ocean.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. -- Alaska's seismic network records thousands of quakes produced by glaciers, capturing valuable data that scientists could use to better understand their behavior, but instead their seismic signals are set aside as oddities. The current earthquake monitoring system could be "tweaked" to target the dynamic movement of the state's glaciers, suggests State Seismologist Michael West, who will present his research today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America (SSA).

In light of recent results from the "world's longest experiment", spanning more than 90 years, at the University of Queensland, a group of researchers from Trinity College Dublin explain the background behind their own pitch-drop experiment in this month's Physics World and offer an explanation as to why their research hit the headlines in 2013.

Alexandria, Va., - Global Positioning System (GPS) technology was conceived in the 1960s to provide precise time and location data to the U.S. military, but it was soon embraced by geodesists and earth scientists. The first major test of GPS as a seismic tool occurred on Oct. 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck San Francisco just as the third game of the World Series was about to begin at Candlestick Park. The quake killed 63 people, injured several thousand and caused an estimated $6 billion in damage.

SAN DIEGO, CA – April 30, 2014 – Three new mango-related studies were presented this week at the 2014 Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) in San Diego, revealing initial findings on the effects of mango consumption on ulcerative colitis and bone parameters in animal models.

Any method that leads to the production of more oil seems counter to the prevailing wisdom on climate change that says use of more greenhouse-gas-emitting fuel is detrimental. But there's one oil-recovery process that some say could be part of the climate change solution and now unites unlikely allies in industry, government and environmental groups, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP passed over Tapah and captured a visible image of the storm that gave a hint of weakening as clouds began to fill its eye. On April 30 at 0900 UTC/5 a.m. EDT, Tropical Storm Tapah continued to weaken as wind shear began to increase and the storm moved toward cooler waters in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean.

Kīlauea volcano, on the Big Island of Hawai'i, typically has effusive eruptions, wherein magma flows to create ropy pāhoehoe lava, for example. However, Kīlauea less frequently erupts more violently, showering scoria and blocks over much of the surface of the island.

A NOAA-led research team has found the first evidence that acidity of continental shelf waters off the West Coast is dissolving the shells of tiny free-swimming marine snails, called pteropods, which provide food for pink salmon, mackerel and herring, according to a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Climate change is set to affect the quality of the wines of the Tempranillo grape variety, according to the conclusions of a piece of research conducted by the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development Neiker-Tecnalia, in collaboration with the University of Navarre and the Aula Dei (EEAD) Experimental Station of the National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). Scientists from these bodies have studied the behaviour of the vines in conditions of climate change; in other words, higher temperature, increased presence of CO2 and greater environmental aridity.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The oldest sections of transform faults, such as the North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ) and the San Andreas Fault, produce the largest earthquakes, putting important limits on the potential seismic hazard for less mature parts of fault zones, according to a new study to be presented today at the Seismological Society of America (SSA) 2014 Annual Meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. The finding suggests that maximum earthquake magnitude scales with the maturity of the fault.

Carbon-based nanostructures such as nanotubes, graphene sheets, and nanoribbons are unique building blocks showing versatile nanomechanical and nanoelectronic properties. These materials which are ordered in the nanoscale, that is, in the dimension of a millionth of millimetre, are promising candidates to envision applications in nanoscale devices, ranging from energy conversion to nano-electronic transistors.