Earth

Engineering scientists at the University of Southampton are flying the world's first fully rapid prototyped air vehicle this week, to help develop new technologies that probe the Earth's atmosphere using an unmanned platform.

The vehicle is part of the ASTRA (Atmospheric Science Through Robotic Aircraft) project, and it aims to demonstrate how a low-cost, bespoke high altitude platform could be developed and manufactured over a period of mere days and used to send a payload with atmospheric monitoring equipment into the upper atmosphere.

Glass fiber cables are indispensable for the internet – now they can also be used as a quantum physics lab. The Vienna University of Technology is the only research facility in the world, where single atoms can be controllably coupled to the light in ultra-thin fiber glass. Specially prepared light waves interact with very small numbers of atoms, which makes it possible to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to tiny trace amounts of a substance.

Computer scientists at UC San Diego, who set out to simulate all rainbows found in nature, wound up answering questions about the physics of rainbows as well. The scientists recreated a wide variety of rainbows – primary rainbows, secondary rainbows, redbows that form at sunset and cloudbows that form on foggy days – by using an improved method for simulating how light interacts with water drops of various shapes and sizes. Their new approach even yielded realistic simulations of difficult-to-replicate "twinned" rainbows that split their primary bow in two.

Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have set a new record for the calculation of scattering amplitudes. This kind of calculation is used to predict the outcome of accelerator experiments in which high-energy particles collide with one another. However, the calculations become increasingly difficult the greater the number of orders the physicists wish to calculate. Professor Dr. Stefan Weinzierl's work group has now developed an algorithm which is far faster and requires less computing capacity than other algorithms.

With news this week of additional radioactive leaks from Fukushima nuclear power plants, the impact on the ocean of releases of radioactivity from the plants remains unclear. But a new study by U.S. and Japanese researchers analyzes the levels of radioactivity discharged from the facility in the first four months after the accident and draws some basic conclusions about the history of contaminant releases to the ocean.

At the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, when Canadians roared with delight at a medal haul that placed the country at an "all-time, all-nation Winter Olympics record of 14 gold medals," athletes did more than win gold–they fired up exuberant displays of national pride and unity across the country.

And new research involving the University of Alberta suggests Canadians are willing to pay to get them.

Plants' and animals' seasonal cycles, such as flowering dates and migration patterns, have shifted in recent decades due to climate change.

Now a new study seems to indicate that some human weather-related behavior also is being influenced by global warming.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found peak attendance in U.S. national parks that have experienced climate change is happening earlier, compared to 30 years ago.

Scientists have developed important new insight into the sensitivity of global temperature to changes in the Earth's radiation balance over the last half million years.

The sensitivity of global temperature to changes in the Earth's radiation balance (climate sensitivity) is a key parameter for understanding past natural climate changes as well as potential future climate change.

Scientists have shown the energy conditions, under which a weak signal supplied to a physical system emerges as a stronger signal at the output thanks to the presence of random noise (a process known as stochastic resonance), in a paper that has just been published in EPJ B¹.

Stochastic resonance goes against the intuitive idea that where noise is present, the signal tends to fade. It occurs in systems where the response is not proportional to the applied input signal, known as nonlinear systems.

Global carbon dioxide emissions increased by a record 5.9 per cent in 2010 following the dampening effect of the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), according to scientists working with the Global Carbon Project.

The Global Carbon Project (GCP) published its annual analysis in the journal Nature Climate Change, reporting that the impact of the GFC on emissions has been short-lived owing to strong emissions growth in emerging economies and a return to emissions growth in developed economies.

Researchers have added further clarity to the global climate trend, proving that global warming is showing no signs of slowing down and that further increases are to be expected in the next few decades.

They revealed the true global warming trend by bringing together and analysing the five leading global temperature data sets, covering the period from 1979 to 2010, and factoring out three of the main factors that account for short-term fluctuations in global temperature: El Niño, volcanic eruptions and variations in the Sun's brightness.

SAN FRANCISCO – Researchers have discovered that the destructive tsunami generated by the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was a long-hypothesized "merging tsunami" that doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its destructive power before reaching shore.

By focusing proton beams using high-intensity lasers, a team of scientists have discovered a new way to heat material and create new states of matter in the laboratory.

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Hemoltz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf of Germany; Technische Universitat Darmstadt of Germany, and General Atomics of San Diego unveiled new findings about how proton beams can be used in myriad applications.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Dec. 5, 2011 -- The sharp decrease in global carbon dioxide emissions attributed to the worldwide financial crisis in 2009 quickly rebounded in 2010, according to research supported by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers who have adapted a three-dimensional, general circulation model of Earth's climate to a time some 2.8 billion years ago when the sun was significantly fainter than present think the planet may have been more prone to catastrophic glaciation than previously believed.