Earth

A better understanding of the universe will be the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, according to a team of University of Oklahoma researchers. The team predicts the discovery will lead to supersymmetry or SUSY—an extension of the standard model of particle physics. SUSY predicts new matter states or super partners for each matter particle already accounted for in the standard model. SUSY theory provides an important new step to a better understanding of the universe we live in.

Alexandria, VA –What is the lifespan of a natural gas deposit? How quickly is our planet's permafrost melting? And does life exist on other planets? Although seemingly unrelated issues, the answers to these questions are linked. And in this month's issue of EARTH Magazine, scientists show that we may be closer to answering them than we think.

Long-term consequences of venous thrombosis

Linda Flinterman of Leiden University, the Netherlands and colleagues report in this week's PLoS Medicine on the long-term mortality rate for individuals who have experienced a first venous thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. They describe an ongoing elevated risk of death for individuals who had experienced a venous thrombosis or pulmonary embolism as compared to controls, for up to eight years after the event.

Of all the habitable parts of our planet, one ecosystem still remains largely unexplored and unknown to science: the igneous ocean crust.

This rocky realm of hard volcanic lava exists beneath ocean sediments that lie at the bottom of much of the world's oceans.

While scientists have estimated that microbes living in deep ocean sediments may represent as much as one-third of Earth's total biomass, the habitable portion of the rocky ocean crust may be 10 times as great.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new analysis of satellite data from the late 1990s documents for the first time the "uplift" of ground above a site of underground nuclear testing, providing researchers a potential new tool for analyzing the strength of detonation.

The study has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.

University of California, Davis, researchers have proposed a radical new way of thinking about the chemical reactions between water and metal oxides, the most common minerals on Earth. Their work appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Materials.

The new paradigm could lead to a better understanding of corrosion and how toxic minerals leach from rocks and soil. It could also help in the development of "green" technology: new types of batteries, for example, or catalysts for splitting water to produce hydrogen fuel.

When scientist David Valentine and colleagues published results of a study in early 2011 reporting that bacterial blooms had consumed almost all the deepwater methane plumes after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill, some were skeptical.

How, they asked the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) geochemist, could almost all the gas emitted disappear?

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — When UC Santa Barbara geochemist David Valentine and colleagues published a study in early 2011 documenting how bacteria blooms had consumed almost all of the deepwater methane plumes following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, some people were skeptical. How, they asked, could almost all of the lethal gas emitted from the Deepwater Horizon well just disappear?

Rice University researchers have figured out what gives armchair nanotubes their unique bright colors: hydrogen-like objects called excitons.

Their findings appear in the online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Armchair carbon nanotubes – so named for the "U"-shaped configuration of the atoms at their uncapped tips – are one-dimensional metals and have no band gap. This means electrons flow from one end to the other with little resistivity, the very property that may someday make armchair quantum wires possible.

Washington, D.C. — Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian geologic period, there was a mass extinction so severe that it remains the most traumatic known species die-off in Earth's history. Although the cause of this event is a mystery, it has been speculated that the eruption of a large swath of volcanic rock in Russia called the Siberian Traps was a trigger for the extinction. New research from Carnegie's Linda Elkins-Tanton and her co-authors offers insight into how this volcanism could have contributed to drastic deterioration in the global environment of the period.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers are beginning their analysis of what are probably the first successful ice cores drilled to bedrock from a glacier in the eastern European Alps.

With luck, that analysis will yield a record of past climate and environmental changes in the region for several centuries, and perhaps even covering the last 1,000 years. Scientists also hope that the core contains the remnants of early human activity in the region, such as the atmospheric byproducts of smelting metals.

Scientists at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Oxford University and the University of Michigan have joined efforts to develop new materials for thermonuclear fusion reactors. Their research focuses on characterization of oxide dispersion-strengthened, reduced-activation steel for the reactor structure.

Summertime hail could all but disappear from the eastern flank of Colorado's Rocky Mountains by 2070, according to a new modeling study by scientists from NOAA and several other institutions.

Less hail damage could be good news for gardeners and farmers, said Kelly Mahoney, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scientist at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. But a shift from hail to rain can also mean more runoff, which could raise the risk of flash floods, she said.