Earth

Magnets have fascinated mankind for millenia. From the Greek philosophers to scientists of the modern era, which saw the rise of quantum mechanics, magnets have been pondered and investigated. Nowadays, they are not only intriguing oddities of nature, but also constitute crucial building blocks of modern technology: Ranging from data storage over medical instrumentation to transportation. And yet, to this day, they continue to puzzle scientists.

Alexandria, VA – Geoscientists using every resource available to them — from bare-earth LIDAR technology to knowledge of turn-of-the-century fashion — have helped correct a 100-year-old mistake about where the San Andreas Fault rupture point was for the historic 1906 earthquake.

James Hanna likes to have fun with his engineering views of physics.

So when he and his colleague Jemal Guven visited their friend Martin Michael Müller in France on a rainy, dreary day, the three intellects decided to stay in. Guven, absent-mindedly switching between channels on the television, stumbled upon a documentary on whirling dervishes, best described as a Sufi religious order, who commemorate the teachings of 13th century Persian mystic and poet Rumi through spinning at a fixed speed in their floor length skirts.

A force that intricately links the rotation of the Earth with the direction of weather patterns in the atmosphere has been shown to play a crucial role in the creation of the hypnotic patterns created by the skirts of the Whirling Dervishes.

The holography technique revealed that the seahorse's head is shaped to minimize the disturbance of water in front of its mouth before it strikes. Just above and in front of the seahorse's nostrils is a kind of "no wake zone," and the seahorse angles its head precisely in relation to its prey so that no fluid disturbance reaches it.

Other small fish with blunter heads, such as the three-spine stickleback, have no such advantage.

A colloquium paper published in EPJ D looks into the alleged issues associated with quantum theory. Berthold-Georg Englert from the National University of Singapore reviews a selection of the potential problems of the theory. In particular, he discusses cases when mathematical tools are confused with the actual observed sub-atomic scale phenomena they are describing. Such tools are essential to provide an interpretation of the observations, but cannot be confused with the actual object of studies.

Washington, D.C.— Government calculations of total U.S. methane emissions may underestimate the true values by 50 percent, a new study finds. The results are published the week of November 25 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and cast doubt on a recent Environmental Protection Agency decision to downscale its emissions estimate.

Current official inventories of methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas released from landfills, livestock ranches and oil and gas facilities, may be underestimated both nationally and in California by a factor of about 1.5, according to new research from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and others.

Cambridge, Mass. – November 25, 2013 – Emissions of methane from fossil fuel extraction and refining activities in the south-central United States are nearly five times higher than previous estimates, according to researchers at Harvard University and seven other institutions. Their study, published this week in PNAS, also suggests that the contribution from livestock operations may be twice as high as previously thought.

Boulder, Colo., USA – GSA Bulletin articles posted online ahead of print in November cover sedimentology in the Sinai-Negev erg of Egypt and Israel; petrology in the Tongling area of Anhui Province in eastern China; paleotopography in the Central Andes of Argentina; sedimentology of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, offshore California, USA; geochronology of Volcán Tepetiltic, western Mexico; and thermochronology of the Appalachian Mountains.

Weizmann Institute scientists have taken a quantum leap toward understanding the phenomenon known as superconductivity: They have created the world's smallest SQUID – a device used to measure magnetic fields – which has broken the world record for sensitivity and resolution.

British cities – unlike their counterparts on the mainland - are taking the lead in making plans to curb and handle the impact of climate change. So says Diana Reckien, of Columbia University in the US, in a study published in Springer's journal Climatic Change that analysed the relevant strategic policies and planning documents of 200 urban areas in eleven European countries. They found that one in every three European cities has no plans on the table to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while seven in every ten urban areas have no formal adaptation plans in place.

This news release is available in German.

Boulder, Colo., USA – Locations studied for this month's posting of Geology articles include New Zealand's Taupo Volcanic Zone; Llaima volcano, Chile; the Mississippi Fan (Gulf of Mexico); the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean; Wax Lake Delta, Louisiana; the Atlas Mountains of Morocco; the East Antarctic Ice Sheet; southern Tibet; the Longmenshan fault, Wenchuan, China; the Regab pockmark, offshore Africa; the Siberian Traps; the eastern California shear zone; Cabo de Gata, southern Spain; and the northwest Borborema province, Brazil.

By exploiting flaws in miniscule diamond fragments, researchers say they have achieved enough coherence of the magnetic moment inherent in these defects to harness their potential for precise quantum sensors in a material that is 'biocompatible'.

Nanoscopic thermal and magnetic field detectors - which can be inserted into living cells - could enhance our understanding of everything from chemical reactions within single cells to signalling in neural networks and the origin of magnetism in novel materials.