Earth

"Cows are happy in parts of Northern California and not in Florida" is a good way to sum up the findings of new research from the University of Washington, said Yoram Bauman, best known as the "stand-up economist."

Bauman and colleagues found that the decline in milk production due to climate change will vary across the U.S., since there are significant differences in humidity and how much the temperature swings between night and day across the country. For instance, the humidity and hot nights make the Southeast the most unfriendly place in the country for dairy cows.

Insecticide resistance is threatening the effectiveness of insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor insecticide sprays to control adult mosquito vectors, and so more sustainable integrated management strategies that use optimal suites of control tactics are needed. These are the arguments of Willem Takken from the Wageningen University and Research Centre in The Netherlands and colleagues in this week's PLoS Medicine.

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Computer networks are the battlefields in cyberwarfare, as exemplified by the United States' recent use of computer viruses to attack Iran's nuclear program. A computer model developed at the University of Missouri could help military strategists devise the most damaging cyber attacks as well as guard America's critical infrastructure. The model also could benefit other projects involving interconnected groups, such as restoring ecosystems, halting disease epidemics and stopping smugglers.

Promising news for those who relish the prospects of a one-inch chip storing multiple terabytes of data, some clarity has been brought to the here-to-fore confusing physics of ferroelectric nanomaterials. A multi-institutional team of researchers, led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has provided the first atomic-scale insights into the ferroelectric properties of nanocrystals. This information will be critical for development of the next generation of nonvolatile data storage devices.

UK scientists will measure the effect on the marine environment and wildlife of devices that harness tide and wave energy using sonar technology that has, for the first time, been successfully deployed on the seabed.

Researchers are working to identify exactly how a changing climate will impact specific elements of weather, such as clouds, rainfall, and lightning. A Tel Aviv University researcher has predicted that for every one degree Celsius of warming, there will be approximately a 10 percent increase in lightning activity.

A multi-institutional team of researchers that included scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has created the first artificial molecules whose chirality can be rapidly switched from a right-handed to a left-handed orientation with a beam of light. This holds potentially huge possibilities for the application of terahertz technologies across a wide range of fields, including biomedical research, homeland security and ultrahigh-speed communications.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide accelerate carbon cycling and soil carbon loss in forests, new research led by an Indiana University biologist has found.

The new evidence supports an emerging view that although forests remove a substantial amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, much of the carbon is being stored in living woody biomass rather than as dead organic matter in soils.

7/10/12, Zurich, Switzerland. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB) the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior suggests that, not only the amount and type of food eaten but the time of day it is eaten, is important in contributing to obesity.

Many of the predictions we make in everyday life are vague, and we often get them wrong because we have incomplete information, such as when we predict the weather.

But in quantum mechanics, even if all the information is available, the outcomes of certain experiments generally can't be predicted perfectly beforehand.

This inability to accurately predict the results of experiments in quantum physics has been the subject of a long debate, going back to Einstein and co-workers, about whether quantum mechanics is the best way to predict outcomes.

CAIRNS, Australia and STANFORD, California – 9 July 2012 -- Like their warrior ancestors, leaders of many Pacific Island nations have been making efforts to safeguard their countries, this time by sounding an alarm as the impact of climate change becomes more apparent.

A Duke University study of well water in northeastern Pennsylvania suggests that naturally occurring pathways could have allowed salts and gases from the Marcellus shale formation deep underground to migrate up into shallow drinking water aquifers.

The study found elevated levels of salinity with similar geochemistry to deep Marcellus brine in drinking water samples from three groundwater aquifers, but no direct links between the salinity and shale gas exploration in the region.

Marine scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have linked the decline in growth of Caribbean forereef corals — due to recent warming — to long-term trends in seawater temperature experienced by these corals located on the ocean-side of the reef. The research was conducted on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System in southern Belize.

The results were revealed online in the July 8 issue of Nature Climate Change, a journal that publishes research on the impacts of global climate change and its implications for the economy, policy and the world at large.

Alexandria, VA – Resting in the Karakoram Range between northern Pakistan and western China, the Karakoram glaciers are stumping climate scientists and Associated Press journalists declaring a localized heat wave is proof of global warming.

Unlike many mountain glaciers, the Karakoram glaciers, which account for 3 percent of the total ice-covered area in the world outside Greenland and Antarctica, are not shrinking.

Satellite measurements show that nitrogen dioxide in the lower atmosphere over parts of Europe and the US has fallen over the past decade. More than 15 years of atmospheric observations have revealed trends in air quality.

As the world's population increases, economies in many countries are also growing and populations are concentrating in large cities. With the use of fossil fuels still on the rise, pollution in large cities is also increasing.Nitrogen dioxide is an important pollutant in the troposphere, the lowest portion of our atmosphere.