Earth

Geologists have a new tool to study how earthquakes change the landscape down to a few inches, and it's giving them insight into how earthquake faults behave. In the Feb. 10 issue of the journal Science, a team of scientists from the U.S., Mexico and China reports the most comprehensive before-and-after picture yet of an earthquake zone, using data from the magnitude 7.2 event that struck near Mexicali, northern Mexico in April, 2010.

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Cambridge, Mass. - February 8, 2012 - Researchers at Harvard University have launched the Peer Instruction (PI) Network, a new global social network for users of interactive teaching methods.

PI, developed by Eric Mazur, Area Dean for Applied Physics and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), is an innovative evidence-based pedagogy designed to improve student engagement and success.

In today's global village, national coffers are more interconnected than ever before. And as the current economic crisis has proven, a downturn in one country can travel in a wave across the globe, like a financial tsunami. Now, researchers from Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with the Kiel Institute of World Economy in Germany, have developed a market "seismograph" — a new methodology that measures the interconnections between stock markets across the globe.

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DALLAS (Feb. 9, 2012) — In a study to be presented today at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting ™, in Dallas, Texas, researchers will report findings that suggest that induction of labor in patients who suffer a rupture of membranes between the 34th and 37th week of gestation (before the onset of labor) does not reduce the risk of infection or respiratory problems in the newborn.

Earth's glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding roughly 150 billion tons of ice annually, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

A paper authored by Jonathan Weiner, DrPH, and colleagues from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, appearing in the February 8, issue of Health Affairs, describes why health reform could lead to favorable or adverse risk selection across health plans. The article reviews provisions within the Affordable Care Act legislation and discusses key risk- adjustment implementation issues for states establishing health insurance exchanges.

At the high-brilliance synchrotron light source PETRA III, a team of DESY scientists headed by Dr. Ralf Röhlsberger has succeeded in making atomic nuclei transparent with the help of X-ray light. At the same time they have also discovered a new way to realize an optically controlled light switch that can be used to manipulate light with light, an important ingredient for efficient future quantum computers.

The research results are presented in the current edition of the scientific journal Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature10741).

Filtering carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from factory smokestacks is a necessary, but expensive part of many manufacturing processes. However, a collaborative research team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Delaware has gathered new insight into the performance of a material called a zeolite that may stop carbon dioxide in its tracks far more efficiently than current scrubbers do.*

A team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland has found an iron-based superconductor that operates at the highest known temperature for a material in its class.* The discovery inches iron-based superconductors—valued for their ease of manufacturability and other properties—closer to being useful in many practical applications.

Edward Mills of the University of Ottawa, Canada and colleagues argue in this week's PLoS Medicine that the HIV/AIDS response in Africa needs a more balanced approach to gender, so that both men and women are involved in HIV treatment and prevention. Traditionally, targeted efforts at reducing the impact of the HIV epidemic have focused on women and children while men have received considerably less attention.

A doll in a doll, and then one more, enveloping them from the outside – this is how Thomas Faessler explains his molecule. He packs one atom in a cage within an atom framework. With their large surfaces these structures can serve as highly efficient catalysts. Just like in the Russian wooden toy, a hull of twelve copper atoms encases a single tin atom. This hull is, in turn, enveloped by 20 further tin atoms.