Earth

The National Weather Service has issued a lot of severe weather watches and warnings. All of these areas are under severe thunderstorm watches, some under tornado watches and flash flood watches. West of and behind the front, the Quad cities in Iowa, areas of Illinois and lower Michigan are dealing with a Winter Weather Advisory, and will watch the rain change over to snow.

Batavia, Ill. -- The world's most precise measurement of the mass of the W boson, one of nature's elementary particles, has been achieved by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

The new measurement is an important, independent constraint of the mass of the theorized Higgs boson. It also provides a rigorous test of the Standard Model that serves as the blueprint for our world, detailing the properties of the building blocks of matter and how they interact.

One year after an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, an independent investigation panel has highlighted the country's failures in disaster planning and crisis management for the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The article, out now in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, shows that agencies were thoroughly unprepared for the cascading nuclear disaster, following a tsunami that should have been anticipated.

Tornadoes on February 29 raked through Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee. The severe storms killed at least 12 people. Tornadoes also touched down in the well-known tourist destination of Branson, Missouri, famous for country music theaters. USA Today reported that up to six of the city's 40 theaters were damaged.

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center reported that tornadoes killed 550 people in the U.S. in 2011.

WASHINGTON -- Centuries of overexploitation of fish and other marine resources — as well as invasion of fish from the Red Sea — have turned some formerly healthy ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea into barren places, an unprecedented study of the Mediterranean concludes.

MIAMI -- A University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science-led study shows a link between large dust storms on Iceland and glacial melting. The dust is both accelerating glacial melting and contributing important nutrients to the surrounding North Atlantic Ocean. The results provide new insights on the role of dust in climate change and high-latitude ocean ecosystems.

In the future, it should be possible to program a simulator like this for any major event where – as in the case of Kaiserslautern – visitors have specific destinations, and programmers have knowledge of topography of the area in question as well as the general size and composition of the crowd. The model cannot be applied to locations such as amusement parks, where visitors walk around without any specific destination. Similarly, it cannot be used to simulate panic situations, where people no longer act rationally.

Approximately 75 percent of electricity used in the United States is produced by coal-burning power plants that spew carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. To reduce this effect, many researchers are searching for porous materials to filter out the CO2 generated by these plants before it reaches the atmosphere, a process commonly known as carbon capture. But identifying these materials is easier said than done.

REDDING, Calif.—Even though wildfires have increased in size over time, they haven't necessarily grown in severity nor had corresponding negative impacts to the ecosystem, according to a recently published study appearing in the journal Ecological Applications.

ALBANY, NY – Scientists from Binghamton University and Cardiff University, and New York State Museum researchers, and have reported the discovery of the floor of the world's oldest forest in a cover article in the March 1 issue of Nature.

One year on from the magnitude-9.0 earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami and caused a partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, this month's special issue of Physics World, on the theme of "Physics and the Earth", includes an investigation by journalist Edwin Cartlidge into the latest advances in earthquake forecasting.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. --- Fifty million years ago, India slammed into Eurasia, a collision that gave rise to the tallest landforms on the planet, the Himalaya Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau.

India and Eurasia continue to converge today, though at an ever-slowing pace. University of Michigan geomorphologist and geophysicist Marin Clark wanted to know when this motion will end and why. She conducted a study that led to surprising findings that could add a new wrinkle to the well-established theory of plate tectonics – the dominant, unifying theory of geology.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – In 2007, a controversial pesticide was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use on fruit and vegetable crops, mainly in California and Florida. Farm workers and scientists protested the approval of the pesticide because its active ingredient, methyl iodide, is a known carcinogen. Now, MU researchers are studying the molecular structure of the pesticide to determine if the product could be made more efficient and safer for those living near, and working in, treated fields.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The discovery of two new extinct camel species by University of Florida scientists sheds new light on the history of the tropics, a region containing more than half the world's biodiversity and some of its most important ecosystems.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Using exotic man-made materials, scientists from Duke University and Boston College believe they can greatly enhance the forces of electromagnetism (EM), one of the four fundamental forces of nature, without harming living beings or damaging electrical equipment.

This theoretical finding could have broad implications for such applications as magnetic levitation trains, which ride inches above the tracks without touching and are propelled by electro-magnets.