Earth

An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has generated the first laser-like beams of X-rays from a tabletop device, paving the way for major advances in many fields including medicine, biology and nanotechnology development.

Chemists at UCL have discovered a new property of flames, which allows them to control reactions at a solid surface in a flame and opens up a whole new field of chemical innovation.

Published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, authors of the new study have discovered their previous understanding of how flames interact with a solid surface was mistaken. For the first time, they have demonstrated that a particular type of chemistry, called redox chemistry, can be accurately controlled at the surface.

A recent report released by the National Science Foundation found that graduate enrollment in science and engineering grew substantially in the past decade.

Approximately 632,700 graduate students were enrolled in science, engineering and health programs in the United States as of fall 2010. This was a 30 percent increase from 493,000 students in 2000, according to the National Science Foundation's Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering.

With simple arguments, researchers show that nature is complicated! Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have made a simple experiment that demonstrates that nature violates common sense – the world is different than most people believe. The experiment illustrates that light does not behave according to the principles of classical physics, but that light has quantum mechanical properties. The new method could be used to study whether other systems behave quantum mechanically. The results have been published in the scientific journal, Physical Review Letters.

A synthetic compound long known to exhibit interesting transition properties may hold the key to new, non-magnetic forms of information storage, say researchers at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center and their collaborators. The team's latest findings shed light on the complex relationship between a compound's electron spin arrangement and its transport properties, an area researchers have long struggled to understand.

Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment researchers have helped open a new door of possibility in the high-stakes effort to save the world's coral reefs.

Working with an international team, the scientists – including Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellows Jeff Koseff, Rob Dunbar and Steve Monismith – found a way to create future ocean conditions in a small lab-in-a-box in Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The water inside the device can mimic the composition of the future ocean as climate change continues to alter Earth.

San Francisco -- In the modern global climate, higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere are associated with rising ocean temperatures. But the seas were not always so sensitive to this CO2 "forcing," according to a new report. Around 5 to 13 million years ago, oceans were warmer than they are today -- even though atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were considerably lower.

Until now, studies of Earth's climate have documented a strong correlation between global climate and atmospheric carbon dioxide; that is, during warm periods, high concentrations of CO2 persist, while colder times correspond to relatively low levels.

However, in this week's issue of the journal Nature, paleoclimate researchers reveal that about 12-5 million years ago climate was decoupled from atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. New evidence of this comes from deep-sea sediment cores dated to the late Miocene period of Earth's history.

A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.

Using scientific theories, toy ecosystem modeling and paleontological evidence as a crystal ball, 18 scientists, including one from Simon Fraser University, predict we're on a much worse collision course with Mother Nature than currently thought.

In Approaching a state-shift in Earth's biosphere, a paper just published in Nature, the authors, whose expertise span a multitude of disciplines, suggest our planet's ecosystems are careening towards an imminent, irreversible collapse.

Research from North Carolina State University demonstrates that a relatively new microscopy technique can be used to improve our understanding of human tissues and other biomedical materials. The study focused specifically on eye tissues, which are damaged by scarring in diabetic patients.

VERNON – Biomass gasification is being considered as a possible technology for converting at least 10 million acres of Texas brush into biofuel, according to Dr. Jim Ansley, Texas AgriLife Research rangeland ecologist in Vernon.

Botswana's Okavango Delta is a sensitive ecosystem that could be affected detrimentally by climate change. Given the Delta's prominence in the country's tourist industry, such negative impacts could wreak havoc on its economy and affect the lives of its inhabitants.

A geoengineering solution to climate change could lead to significantrainfall reduction in Europe and North America, a team of Europeanscientists concludes. The researchers studied how models of the Earth ina warm, CO2‑rich world respond to an artificial reduction in the amountof sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. The study is published todayin Earth System Dynamics, an Open Access journal of the EuropeanGeosciences Union (EGU).

Top-down advocacy on health and climate at the UN level needs to be mirrored by bottom-up public health actions that bring health and climate co-benefits according to international experts writing in this week's PLoS Medicine.