Earth

Mediterranean bottom currents and the sediment deposits they leave behind offer new insights into global climate change, the opening and closing of ocean circulation gateways and locations where hydrocarbon deposits may lie buried under the sea.

Planets can orbit a star for billions of years. Electrons circling the atomic nucleus are often visualized as tiny planets. But due to quantum effects, the behavior of atoms usually differs significantly from planetary systems. Austrian and US-American scientists have now succeeded in keeping electrons on planet-like orbits for a long time. This was done using an idea from astronomy: Jupiter stabilizes the orbits of asteroids (the so called "Trojans"), and in a very similar way, the orbits of electrons around the nucleus can be stabilized using an electromagnetic field.

The mating habits of marine turtle may help to protect them against the effects of climate change, according to new research led by the University of Exeter. Published today (25 January 2012) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study shows how the mating patterns of a population of endangered green turtles may be helping them deal with the fact that global warming is leading to a disproportionate number of females being born.

Wetland restoration is a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States that aims to create ecosystems similar to those that disappeared over the past century. But a new analysis of restoration projects shows that restored wetlands seldom reach the quality of a natural wetland.

HOUSTON -- Rice University physicists have gone to extremes to prove that Isaac Newton's classical laws of motion can apply in the atomic world: They've built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom of potassium.

In a new paper published this week in Physical Review Letters, Rice's team and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could cause an electron in an atom to orbit the nucleus in precisely the same way that Jupiter's Trojan asteroids orbit the sun.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of "bilayer graphene" (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics.

Graphene, nature's thinnest elastic material, is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Because of graphene's planar and chicken wire-like structure, sheets of it lend themselves well to stacking.

New software has significant benefits for primary school children and their understanding of elementary physics, research shows. Studies funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) focused on what primary school children know when they begin studying physics, and how much they still have to learn. The studies looked at how much children understand about the movement of objects such as direction and speed.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), along with other funding agencies, helped a Rice University research team make graphene suitable for a variety of organic chemistry applications—especially the promise of advanced chemical sensors, nanoscale electronic circuits and metamaterials.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – While it may appear that infants are helpless creatures that only blink, eat, cry and sleep, one University of Missouri researcher says that studies indicate infant brains come equipped with knowledge of "intuitive physics."

Scientists from the University of Bristol have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap's magnetic properties were proved with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin to result from tiny iron-rich clumps that sit within the watery solution. The generation of this property in a fully functional soap could calm concerns over the use of soaps in oil-spill clean ups and revolutionise industrial cleaning products.

By using a novel technique to better understand mineral growth and dissolution, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are improving predictions of mineral reactions and laying the groundwork for applications ranging from keeping oil pipes clear to sequestering radium.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Might a penguin's next meal be affected by the exhaust from your tailpipe? The answer may be yes, when you add your exhaust fumes to the total amount of carbon dioxide lofted into the atmosphere by humans since the industrial revolution. One-third of that carbon dioxide is absorbed by the world's oceans, making them more acidic and affecting marine life.

In California's Death Valley, death is looking just a bit closer. Geologists have determined that the half-mile-wide Ubehebe Crater, formed by a prehistoric volcanic explosion, was created far more recently than previously thought—and that conditions for a sequel may exist today.

Kimberlites are magmatic rocks that form deep in the Earth's interior and are brought to the surface by volcanic eruptions. On their turbulent journey upwards magmas assimilate other types of minerals, collectively referred to as xenoliths (Greek for "foreign rocks"). The xenoliths found in kimberlite include diamonds, and the vast majority of the diamonds mined in the world today is found in kimberlite ores. Exactly how kimberlites acquire the necessary buoyancy for their long ascent through the Earth's crust has, however, been something of a mystery.

Physicists at the University of New South Wales have observed a new kind of interaction that can arise between electrons in a single-atom silicon transistor.

The findings, to be published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, offer a more complete understanding of the mechanisms for electron transport in nanostructures at the atomic level.

"We have been able to study some of the most complicated transport mechanisms that can arise up to the single atom level," says lead author Dr Giuseppe C. Tettamanzi, from the School of Physics at UNSW.