Earth

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- In residential neighborhoods near manufacturing industries, a breath of air may be more hazardous than refreshing depending on the location, finds a recent study involving a Kansas State University geologist.

The sinking of the ocean liner Titanic 100 years ago is perhaps the most famous--and most studied--disaster of the 20th century. Countless books and movies have examined in great detail the actions, choices and mistakes that led to the Titanic colliding with an iceberg the night of April 14, 1912, and sinking within hours, with approximately 1,500 people losing their lives in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

One question, however, has often been overlooked: Where did the killer iceberg come from, and could the moon have helped set the stage for disaster?

The Burgess Shale of British Columbia is arguably the most important fossil deposit in the world, providing an astounding record of the Cambrian "Explosion," the rapid flowering of complex life from single-celled ancestors. While most of the fossil record is comprised of shells, teeth and bones, the Burgess Shale preserves the softer bits—the eyes, guts, gills and other delicate structures—of animals belonging to Earth's earliest complex ecosystems a half a billion years ago.

Among the many intriguing aspects of the deep sea, Earth's largest ecosystem, exist environments known as hydrothermal vent systems where hot water surges out from the seafloor. On the flipside the deep sea also features cold areas where methane rises from "seeps" on the ocean bottom.

The introduction of national, comprehensive smoke-free legislation in Scotland is linked with significant falls in preterm delivery and small for dates (gestational age) infants according to a study led by Jill Pell from the University of Glasgow and published in this week's PLoS Medicine.

These findings add to the growing evidence of the wide-ranging health benefits of smoke-free legislation and support the adoption of such legislation in other countries, which have yet to implement smoking bans.

Determining with precision the carbon balance of North America is complicated, but researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have devised a method that considerably advances the science.

Past waves of extinctions which removed some of the world's largest animals were caused by both people and climate change, according to new research from the University of Cambridge. Their findings were reported today, 05 March, in the journal PNAS.

DURHAM, NC -- The increasing use of large breakwaters and other hard structures to reduce erosion in "living shorelines" along coastal estuaries may be no better for the environment than the ecologically harmful bulkheads they were designed to replace, according to a report this week by scientists at Duke and Western Carolina universities.

Originally, living shorelines were designed to use natural methods such as replanted native marsh grasses and oyster reefs to stabilize and protect eroding shorelines.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 1, 2012 -- Climate change has been studied extensively, but a new body of research guided by a San Francisco State University hydrologist looks beneath the surface of the phenomenon and finds that climate change will put particular strain on one of our most important natural resources: groundwater.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have revolutionised the electron microscope by developing a new method which could create the highest resolution images ever seen.

For over 70 years, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), which 'looks through' an object to see atomic features within it, has been constrained by the relatively poor lenses which are used to form the image.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., March 5, 2012 – Elevated carbon dioxide concentrations can increase carbon storage in the soil, according to results from a 12-year carbon dioxide-enrichment experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The increased storage of carbon in soil could help to slow down rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

Even if zero emissions of greenhouse gases were to be achieved, the world's temperature would continue to rise by about a quarter of a degree over a decade. That's a best-case scenario, according to a paper co-written by a Simon Fraser University researcher.

New climate change research - Climate response to zeroed emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols — published in Nature's online journal, urges the public, governments and industries to wake up to a harsh new reality.

(March 4, 2012) Millbrook, N.Y. – Past disturbances, such as logging, can obscure the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems. So reports a study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, exploring nitrogen dynamics, found that untangling climate impacts from other factors can be difficult, even when scientists have access to decades of data on a forest's environmental conditions.

For almost fifteen years Professor Nicolas Gisin and his physicist col- laborators have been entangling photons. If this exercise seems to them perhaps henceforth trivial, it continues to elude us ordinary humans. The laws that govern the quantum world are so strange that they completely escape us human beings confronted with the laws of the macroscopic world. This apparent difference in nature between the infinitesimally small and our world poses the question of what link exists between the two.