Earth

Tiger sharks are known as impressive predators that hunt and consume almost anything from birds to sea turtles. But when the opportunity presents itself, these sharks easily convert into the role of marine scavengers. This behavior was reported¹ in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology by a team of American, Australian and British researchers led by Neil Hammerschlag of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in the US.

BINGHAMTON, NY - Whether an HIV-positive man has met cultural expectations of masculinity might impact how much stigma he experiences, according to a new study from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Scientists from the NOvA collaboration have announced an exciting new result that could improve our understanding of the behavior of neutrinos.

Neutrinos have previously been detected in three types, called flavors - muon, tau and electron. They also exist in three mass states, but those states don't necessarily correspond directly to the three flavors. They relate to each other through a complex (and only partially understood) process called mixing, and the more we understand about how the flavors and mass states connect, the more we will know about these mysterious particles.

What does one need to strengthen or toughen concrete? A lot of nothing. Or something.

The "nothing" is in the form of microscopic voids and the "something" consists of particular particles embedded in the most common construction material on Earth. Rice University materials scientist Rouzbeh Shahsavari and postdoctoral researcher Ning Zhang analyzed more than 600 computer models of concrete's inner matrix to determine that both voids and portlandite particles are significant players in giving the material its remarkable qualities.

Chemical engineers and chemists from Rice University and China's Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics have made something so useful and unusual they aren't yet sure how much it's worth.

In a new paper in the journal Green Chemistry, a team led by Rice's Michael Wong describes a new process for making extremely pure levoglucosan (LGA), a naturally occurring organic compound that has been so rare and expensive that drugmakers and chemical engineers typically haven't considered using it.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4, 2016 -- Recent news of Olympic doping scandals have led to strict penalties and a closer look at steroid testing. Chemistry plays a huge role on both sides of the performance-enhancing drug battle. On one side are officials and scientists, aiming to keep the competitions fair; on the other are underground or overseas chemists, creating new drugs to cheat the system. This week, Reactions goes into the science of steroids -- what they are, what they do and how scientists test for them.

DENVER - Despite growing rates of obesity in the United States, and a culture apparently obsessed with selfies, women today appear to be more accepting of their bodies than in the past, at least in regard to weight, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association's 124th Annual Convention.

"While women consistently report being more dissatisfied with their bodies than men as far as thinness is concerned, that dissatisfaction has decreased over the 31-year period we studied," said Bryan Karazsia, PhD, of The College of Wooster, who presented the research.

Washington, DC -- Offering a rare insider analysis of the climate assessment process, Carnegie's Katharine Mach and colleagues at the Department of Global Ecology examined the writing and editing procedures by which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change creates summaries of their findings for policymakers. Despite recent critiques that these summaries are too difficult for non-experts, Mach and colleagues found them comparable to reference texts in terms of reading comprehension level. Their results are published by Science Advances.

Superconductors are materials that, when cooled below a certain temperature, conduct free-flowing electricity without it being impeded by resistance. They are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, magnetic levitation trains and particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. Researchers are constantly on the lookout for materials that can become superconducting at higher-than-currently-possible temperatures and lower costs.

New research suggests that it is possible to create a new form of light by binding light to a single electron, combining the properties of both.

According to the scientists behind the study, from Imperial College London, the coupled light and electron would have properties that could lead to circuits that work with packages of light - photons - instead of electrons.

It would also allow researchers to study quantum physical phenomena, which govern particles smaller than atoms, on a visible scale.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have achieved a quantum logic gate with record-breaking 99.9% precision, reaching the benchmark required theoretically to build a quantum computer.

Quantum computers, which function according to the laws of quantum physics, have the potential to dwarf the processing power of today's computers, able to process huge amounts of information all at once.

Tropical Storm Earl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane in Belize on Aug. 4, and NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite saw the storm move over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula the next day.

On Aug. 4 at 3:30 p.m. EDT (19:30 UTC) the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible-light image of Earl over the Yucatan. The VIIRS image showed that Earl still had thunderstorms around its center of circulation, but bands of thunderstorms around the center were fragmented.

Preventing the extinction of gorillas, rhinoceroses, elephants, lions, tigers, wolves, bears and the world's other largest mammals will require bold political action and financial commitments from nations worldwide. In an article in the journal BioScience, 43 wildlife experts write that without immediate changes, many of the Earth's most iconic species will be lost.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new analysis suggests that massive earthquakes on northern sections of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, affecting areas of the Pacific Northwest that are more heavily populated, are somewhat more frequent than has been believed in the past.

The chance of one occurring within the next 50 years is also slightly higher than previously estimated.

A NASA satellite animation of imagery from NOAA's GOES-East satellite shows the movement and landfall of Hurricane Earl near Belize City, Belize.

NOAA's GOES-East satellite has been providing visible and infrared data on Hurricane Earl since its development as a tropical depression on Aug. 2. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the NASA/NOAA GOES project combined the data into an animation that showed the movement and strengthening of Earl from Aug. 2 to Aug. 4 through the Caribbean Sea.