Earth

A low pressure area is centered over eastern Oklahoma, and its associated cold front drapes south into eastern Texas. The front is stalled over eastern Texas and eastern Oklahoma and is generating severe weather today.

NASA's Aqua satellite and NOAA's GOES-13 satellite have been providing infrared, visible and microwave images to forecasters of the stalled frontal system.

Boulder, CO, USA - New GSA BULLETIN science published online 9-20 March includes studies in the western Aleutians, south-central Alaska, Canada, Iceland, the Southern Pyrenees, and the western Gulf of Mexico. Topics cover the crystallization process of granophyre, marine outcrops in south-central Chile, characterizing the source and age of Wilcox Group sediments, sediments transported to the deep-sea trench, pieces of mid-oceanic ridge found above ground, and large wedges of crust added to the edges of existing continents.

A newly released NOAA study will help New York state officials make advances in managing their coastal waters and guiding future development of offshore wind energy projects.

The study, A Biogeographic Assessment of Seabirds, Deep Sea Corals and Ocean Habitats of the New York Bight, will help the state identify favorable wind energy development sites in the Atlantic and protect critical offshore bird and fish habitats. Ultimately, siting decisions will be streamlined spurring development of wind energy industry jobs in the region.

Alexandria, VA – Beautiful views and exotic thrills draw millions of tourists to volcanic sites each year. Previously frequented by smaller numbers of experienced hikers and trained tour guides, today's volcanic sites are plagued by throngs of novice hikers, who are often ill-prepared and uneducated about the risks of volcano geotourism. These groups of vacation-goers often display a lackadaisical attitude about safety that can put their lives at risk.

Sometimes, solutions for hard problems can turn out to be pretty basic. That's especially true for a team of researchers at the Office of Science's Brookhaven National Laboratory (Brookhaven Lab), where the solution for a hard problem they were working on turned out to be pretty basic . . . and also a bit acidic.

A new study by researchers at MIT shows that there is enough capacity in deep saline aquifers in the United States to store at least a century's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the nation's coal-fired powerplants. Though questions remain about the economics of systems to capture and store such gases, this study addresses a major issue that has overshadowed such proposals.

Health must be taken into account in climate change mitigation strategies. It is not widely appreciated that there are many benefits to health that are likely to accrue from a low carbon economy, say experts in a special supplement published on bmj.com today. They believe that health professionals "are uniquely placed to guide the climate change conversation towards better policies that are good for the planet and for people."

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Even if humankind manages to limit global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends, future generations will have to deal with sea levels 12 to 22 meters (40 to 70 feet) higher than at present, according to research published in the journal Geology.

A clock accurate to within a tenth of a second over 14 billion years – the age of the universe – is the goal of research being reported this week by scientists from three different institutions. To be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the research provides the blueprint for a nuclear clock that would get its extreme accuracy from the nucleus of a single thorium ion.

University of Chicago physicists have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, that atoms chilled to temperatures near absolute zero may behave like seemingly unrelated natural systems of vastly different scales, offering potential insights into links between the atomic realm and deep questions of cosmology.

AMHERST, Mass. – Combining known factors in a new way, theoretical physicists Boris Svistunov and Nikolai Prokof'ev at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with three alumni of their group, have solved an intractable 50-year-old problem: How to simulate strongly interacting quantum systems to allow accurate predictions of their properties.

It could open the door to practical superconductor applications, as well as to solving difficult "many-body" problems in high-energy physics, condensed matter and ultra-cold atoms.

When a proton – the bare nucleus of a hydrogen atom – transfers from one molecule to another, or moves within a molecule, the result is a hydrogen bond, in which the proton and another atom like nitrogen or oxygen share electrons. Conventional wisdom has it that proton transfers can only happen using hydrogen bonds as conduits, "proton wires" of hydrogen-bonded networks that can connect and reconnect to alter molecular properties.

Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum physics are expected to merge at the Planck-scale of extremely high energies and on very short distances. At this scale, new phenomena could arise. However, the Planck-scale is so remote from current experimental capabilities that tests of quantum gravity are widely believed to be nearly impossible. Now an international collaboration between the groups of Caslav Brukner and Markus Aspelmeyer at the University of Vienna and Myungshik Kim at Imperial College London has proposed a new quantum experiment using Planck-mass mirrors.

As the desert Southwest becomes hotter and drier, semi-arid grasslands are slowly being replaced by a landscape dominated by mesquite trees, such as Prosopis velutina, and other woody shrubs, a team of University of Arizona researchers has found.

In a "leaf-to-landscape" approach, the team combined physiological experiments on individual plants and measurements across entire ecosystems to quantify how well grasslands, compared to mesquite trees and woody shrubs, cope with heat and water stress across seasonal precipitation periods.

A fundamental shift in the Indian monsoon has occurred over the last few millennia, from a steady humid monsoon that favored lush vegetation to extended periods of drought, reports a new study led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The study has implications for our understanding of the monsoon's response to climate change.