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ATLANTA – Scientists from Georgia State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a new way to examine certain properties of electrons in graphene – a very thin material that may hold the key to new technologies in computing and other fields.

Ramesh Mani, associate professor of physics at GSU, working in collaboration with Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor of physics at Georgia Tech, measured the spin properties of the electrons in graphene, a material made of carbon atoms that is only one atom thick.

Magnetic monopoles, entities with isolated north or south magnetic poles, weren't supposed to exist. If you try to saw a bar magnet in half, all you succeed in getting are two magnets, each with a south and north pole. In recent years, however, the existence of monopoles, at least in the form of "quasiparticles" consisting of collective excitations among many atoms, has been predicted and demonstrated in the lab.

An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Helsinki has discovered a surprising new chemical compound in Earth's atmosphere that reacts with sulfur dioxide to form sulfuric acid, which is known to have significant impacts on climate and health.

The phenomenon in ferromagnetic nanodisks of magnetic vortices– hurricanes of magnetism only a few atoms across – has generated intense interest in the high-tech community because of the potential application of these vortices in non-volatile Random Access Memory (RAM) data storage systems. New findings from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) indicate that the road to magnetic vortex RAM might be more difficult to navigate than previously supposed, but there might be unexpected rewards as well.

Research has revealed that the extremely hot, dry and windy conditions on Black Saturday combined with structures in the atmosphere called 'horizontal convective rolls' -similar to streamers of wind flowing through the air - which likely affected fire behaviour.

The study is the first of its kind to produce such detailed, high-resolution simulations of weather patterns on the day and provides insights for future fire management and warning systems.

Washington State University researchers have documented an under-appreciated group of players in global warming: dams, the water reservoirs behind them, and surges of greenhouse gases as water levels go up and down.

Plants use a sophisticated series of defense mechanisms to restrict the growth of parasitic bacteria upon infection by stimulating various hormonal signals that trigger alterations in gene expression networks. The Salk findings and other recent studies suggest that these cellular defense responses engage the DNA methylation machinery to impart control over gene expression networks.

Diseased trees in forests may be a significant new source of methane that causes climate change, according to researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in Geophysical Research Letters.

Sixty trees sampled at Yale Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut contained concentrations of methane that were as high as 80,000 times ambient levels. Normal air concentrations are less than 2 parts per million, but the Yale researchers found average levels of 15,000 parts per million inside trees.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — California's hydropower is vulnerable to climate change, a University of California, Riverside scientist has advised policymakers in "Our Changing Climate," a report released July 31 by the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission (CEC).

Minimal evidence of a Higgs transition 1 of north and south poles of electron spins was observed in a magnet Yb2Ti2O7 at the absolute temperature 2 0.21 K. A fractionalization of these monopoles from electron spins was observed on cooling to 0.3 K. On further cooling below 0.21 K, the material showed the ferromagnetism to be understood as a superconductivity of monopoles. The work is reported in an online science journal "Nature Communications" in UK on August 7, by an international collaboration team of Dr.

The first controlled studies of extremely hot, dense matter have overthrown the widely accepted 50-year old model used to explain how ions influence each other's behavior in a dense plasma. The results should benefit a wide range of fields, from research aimed at tapping nuclear fusion as an energy source to understanding the inner workings of stars.

The Barnett Shale is a geological formation in North Texas bearing a large amount of natural gas that was difficult to recover prior to recent technological advances such as hydraulic fracturing. The formation lies beneath Dallas and Fort Worth and extends over several counties, mostly to the west of those cities. Development of the Barnett Shale and other unconventional plays such as the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia have spurred dramatic growth in domestic natural gas production.

ZURICH — Though sophisticated three-dimensional imagery is abundant in computer-generated games and movies, a group of researchers from Disney Research, Zürich, University of California, San Diego, Limbic Software, and RWTH Aachen University say they have gained insights to improve the rendering of those images by envisioning a flat, two-dimensional world.

ZURICH — Scientists have yet to fully unravel the mysteries of rainbows, but a group of researchers from Disney Research, Zürich, UC San Diego, Universidad de Zaragoza, and Horley, UK, have used simulations of these natural wonders to unlock the secret to a rare optical phenomenon known as the twinned rainbow.

Unlike the more common double-rainbow, which consists of two separate and concentric rainbow arcs, the elusive twinned rainbow appears as two rainbows arcs that split from a single base rainbow. Sometimes it is even observed in combination with a double rainbow.

A fundamental characteristic of quantum physics is the fact that two or more particles can exhibit correlations stronger than classically allowed. This unique characteristic applies particularly to quantum entanglement: as soon as the quantum state of a particle is measured the state of its entangled partner changes accordingly, regardless of how far apart the two entangled particles might be. This feature allows for the remote quantum state preparation, which is an essential ingredient for applications in quantum communication, quantum cryptography, and quantum computation.