Earth

Scientists have produced a previously unseen uranium molecule, in a development that could help improve clean-up processes for nuclear waste.

The distinctive butterfly-shaped compound is similar to radioactive molecules that scientists had proposed to be key components of nuclear waste, but were thought too unstable to exist for long.

Researchers have shown the compound to be robust, which implies that molecules with a similar structure may be present in radioactive waste.

An international team of physicists has determined a key parameter, which governs how neutrinos behave. This discovery measures a critical linchpin in the study of the tiny particles and in advancing the understanding of how these building blocks of all things, from galaxies to tea cups, came to be.

LONDON – (March 8, 2012) -- Ecotourism activities that use food to attract and concentrate wildlife for viewing have become a controversial topic in ecological studies. This debate is best exemplified by the shark dive tourism industry, a highly lucrative and booming global market. Use of chum or food to attract big sharks to areas where divers can view the dwindling populations of these animals has generated significant criticism because of the potential for ecological and behavioral impacts to the species.

Desert ants have adapted to a life in a barren environment which only provides very few landmarks for orientation. Apart from visual cues and odors the ants use the polarized sunlight as a compass and count their steps in order to return safely to their home after searching for food.

Christian Santangelo, Ryan Hayward and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently employed photographic techniques and polymer science to develop a new technique for printing two-dimensional sheets of polymers that can fold into three-dimensional shapes when water is added. The technique may lead to wide ranging practical applications from medicine to robotics

The journal Science publishes the research in its March 9 issue.

If you've been thinking our world is more green than frozen these days, you're right. A recent study has found that spring is indeed arriving earlier – and autumn later – in the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The reason? The urban landscape traps heat in the summer and holds it throughout the winter, triggering leaves to turn green earlier in the spring and to stay green later into autumn. The result is a new, extended growing season.

A new discovery provides a crucial key to understanding how neutrinos – ghostly particles with multiple personalities – change identity and may help shed light on why matter exists in the universe.

In an announcement today (Thursday, March 8), members of the large international Daya Bay collaboration reported the last of three measurements that describe how the three types, or flavors, of neutrinos blend with one another, providing an explanation for their spooky morphing from one flavor to another, a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. – A team of researchers at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering have discovered that individual atoms can catalyze industrially important chemical reactions such as the hydrogenation of acetylene, offering potentially significant economic and environmental benefits. The research appears in the March 9 issue of Science.

An international team of physicists has developed a method for taking ultrafast 'sonograms' that can track the structural changes that take place within solid materials in trillionth-of-a-second intervals as they go through an important physical process called a phase transition.

The 2011 Tohoku tsunami was Japan's deadliest in more than 100 years. Despite an extraordinary level of preparedness by the Japanese, the tsunami caused more than 90 percent of the almost 20,000 fatalities last March.

Georgia Tech Associate Professor Hermann Fritz and his research team are studying the impact of the tsunami on the Sanriku coast.

Using eyewitness video and terrestrial laser scanners from atop the highest buildings that survived the tsunami, Fritz has mapped the tsunami's height and flood zone to learn more about the flow of the devastating currents.

Cambridge, Mass. - March 8, 2012 - Researchers in applied physics have cleared an important hurdle in the development of advanced materials, called metamaterials, that bend light in unusual ways.

Working at a scale applicable to infrared light, the Harvard team has used extremely short and powerful laser pulses to create three-dimensional patterns of tiny silver dots within a material. Those suspended metal dots are essential for building futuristic devices like invisibility cloaks.

A proposed new time-keeping system tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years - the age of the Universe.

In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters - with US researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Nevada – UNSW's Professor Victor Flambaum and colleague Dr Vladimir Dzuba report that their proposed single-ion clock would be accurate to 19 decimal places.

Tecnalia Research and Innovation is participating in the Saleme project together with the Spanish companies Demesel, Tesa and Ingema –the Matía Gerontology Institute–, in the development of a door for emergency exits adapted for people with functional diversity.

An international team of researchers from Germany and the Netherlands has developed a new material for storage media. For the first time they enable the switching of so called spin currents at room temperature in a vertical magnetic field. This increases the storage density distinctly. The novel switches can be used, for example, as read heads in future hard discs or as bits in non-volatile random access memory devices (MRAM). The research group from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and Nijmegen are reporting their results in Nature Communications.