Earth

When potato production started in Idaho more than 100 years ago, farmers seeded their crops in ridged rows and watered their plants by channeling surface irrigation to flow through the furrows between the rows. Even though most commercial potato producers in the Pacific Northwest now irrigate their crops with sprinklers, they still typically use ridged-row planting systems.

Prospecting — the search for valuable reserves such as gold, diamond and natural gas — isn't just a matter of luck. It's about knowing where to look. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University have modernized the hit-or-miss search with cutting-edge technology that scans the earth for signs of lucrative resources that could lurk beneath our feet.

In this month's edition of Physics World, David Wilkinson, visiting fellow at Nottingham Trent University and former project manager in the UK Home Office Scientific Development Branch, explains how physics is at the forefront of police weapons testing, making sure that potential devices meet the strict criteria set out by the UK government.

A new study of soot, considered the second most important but frequently overlooked factor in global warming, provides more evidence that reducing soot emissions from diesel engines and other sources could slow melting of sea ice in the Arctic more quickly and economically than any other quick fix.

A toxic chemical produced by tiny marine microbes worked against laboratory models of colon cancer, notes a study in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, in which medicinal chemists describe how they took a generally lethal byproduct of marine cyanobacteria, Apratoxin S4, and made it more specifically toxic — to cancer cells.

When the scientists gave low doses of the compound to mice with a form of colon cancer, they found that it inhibited tumor growth without the overall poisonous effect of the natural product. Even at relatively high doses, the agent was effective and safe.

A new study suggests that Homo erectus, a precursor to modern humans, was using advanced toolmaking methods in East Africa 1.8 million years ago, at least 300,000 years earlier than previously thought. The study in Nature raises new questions about where these early humans originated and how they developed sophisticated tool-making technology.

PHILADELPHIA — In solid materials with regular atomic structures, figuring out weak points where the material will break under stress is relatively easy. But for disordered solids, like glass or sand, their disordered nature makes such predictions much more daunting tasks.

For the first time, researchers at the University of California, Davis, have demonstrated that forest trees have the ability to tap into nitrogen found in rocks, boosting the trees' growth and their ability to pull more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Given that carbon dioxide is the most important climate-change gas, the nitrogen in rocks could significantly affect how rapidly the earth will warm in the future, the researchers say. They report their findings in the Sept. 1 issue of the scientific journal Nature.

GREENBELT, Md. -- Two of the most destructive natural disasters of 2010 were closely linked by a single meteorological event, a Rossby wave, even though they occurred 1,500 miles apart and the results were completely different, according to a new NASA study.

The research finds that the same abnormal Rossby wave sparked extreme heat and persistent wildfires in Russia as well as unusual downstream wind patterns that shifted rainfall in the Indian monsoon region and fueled heavy flooding in Pakistan.

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Much like a meteor impacting a planet, highly charged ions hit really hard and can do a lot of damage, albeit on a much smaller scale. And much like geologists determine the size and speed of the meteor by looking at the hole it left, physicists can learn a lot about a highly charged ion's energy by looking at the divots it makes in thin films.

Working with the government of Lao PDR (Laos, Greater Mekong Subregion of Southeast Asia), the Wildlife Conservation Society has helped to successfully hatch a clutch of 20 Siamese crocodiles, a species threatened across its range by hunting, habitat fragmentation and loss, and other factors.

Hatched from eggs taken from the wild and incubated at the Laos Zoo, the baby crocodiles represent a success for a new program that works to save the Siamese crocodile and the wetlands and associated biodiversity of Laos' Savannakhet Province.

As wolf populations grow in parts of the West, most of the focus has been on the desire of ranchers and home owners to shoot them versus their value in aiding broader ecosystem recovery. A new study points out that they could play an important role in helping to save other threatened species.

Energy researchers and environmental advocates are excited about the prospect of gaining more efficient large-scale biofuel production by using large grasses like miscanthus or switchgrass rather than corn.

They have investigated yields, land use, economics and more, but one key factor of agriculture has been overlooked: water.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, a collaboration between the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge, which includes Nobel Prize winning scientists Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov, has discovered a crucial recipe for improving characteristics of graphene devices for use as photodetectors in future high-speed optical communications.

By combining graphene with metallic nanostructures, they show a twentyfold enhancement in harvesting light by graphene, which paves the way for advances in high-speed internet and other communications.