Earth

A custom-built, $2.5 million "split magnet" system with the potential to revolutionize scientific research in a variety of fields has made its debut at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University.

The extended Coulomb failure stress (ECFS) criteria and anisotropic porosity and permeability tensor at micro/meso/macro scale under ultra‑high temperature and pressure (UTP) conditions were developed employing the flow driven pore‑network crack (FDPNC) model under multiple temporal–spatial scales and the hybrid hypersingular integral equation‑lattice Boltzmann method (HHIE‑LBM). The correlation of the Zipingpu reservoir and Longmenshan slip was then analyzed and the fluid–solid coupled three‑dimensional facture mechanism of the reservoir and earthquake fault was explored.

New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are still America's largest metropolitan areas, but none of the nation's 366 metropolitan areas added more people during the past decade than Houston. Based on a new extensive analysis of the 2000 and 2010 censuses by Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, the Greater Houston metropolitan area grew by a whopping 1.2 million people and increased by more than 123,000 per year over the decade.

What looks like a spongy ball wrapped in strands of yarn -- but a lot smaller -- could be key to unlocking better methods for catalysis, artificial photosynthesis or splitting water into hydrogen, according to Rice University chemists who have created a platform to analyze interactions between carbon nanotubes and a wide range of photoluminescent materials.

Ohio State University researchers are leveraging powerful supercomputers to investigate one of the key observational probes of "dark energy," the mysterious energy form that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate over time.

Sepiolite is a lightweight porous mineral used in cat litter and other applications. The extraordinary properties of this clay make it a highly sought after mineral, despite its scarcity in the Earth's crust: only a few mines worldwide extract it, several of them clustered near Madrid in Spain, the world's biggest exporter of this material.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Earthquakes and volcanoes are known for their ability to transform Earth's surface, but new research in the Caribbean has found they can also move ancient Earth rock foundations more than 1,000 miles.

07/07/11, Clearwater Beach, FL. Research to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, may explain why some antipsychotic drugs can promote overeating, weight gain, and insulin resistance.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe, why nature favored matter over antimatter at the universe's creation.

Positronium is made up of an electron and its antimatter twin, the positron. It has applications in developing more accurate Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans and in fundamental physics research.

The author of this paper set out to determine the extent to which potential "errors" in many early epidemiologic studies led to erroneous conclusions about an inverse association between moderate drinking and coronary heart disease (CHD). His analysis is based on prospective data for more than 124,000 persons interviewed in the U.S. National Health Interview Surveys of 1997 through 2000 and avoids the pitfalls of some earlier studies.

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered previously unknown volcanoes in the ocean waters around the remote South Sandwich Islands. Using ship-borne sea-floor mapping technology during research cruises onboard the RRS James Clark Ross, the scientists found 12 volcanoes beneath the sea surface – some up to 3km high. They found 5km diameter craters left by collapsing volcanoes and 7 active volcanoes visible above the sea as a chain of islands.

This is a video of a violent interaction between the mother and the perpetrator recorded on the first day of infanticide recorded on April 28, 2010.

(Photo Credit: Lab of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution at Seoul National University)

The perpetrator attacks by pecking.

(Photo Credit: Lab of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution at Seoul National University)

Olympia, site of the famous Temple of Zeus and original venue of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, was presumably destroyed by repeated tsunamis that travelled considerable distances inland, and not by earthquake and river floods as has been assumed to date. Evidence in support of this new theory on the virtual disappearance of the ancient cult site on the Peloponnesian peninsula comes from Professor Dr Andreas Vött of the Institute of Geography of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany.

MADISON – How deep is the ocean's capacity to buffer against climate change?

As one of the planet's largest single carbon absorbers, the ocean takes up roughly one-third of all human carbon emissions, reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and its associated global changes.

But whether the ocean can continue mopping up human-produced carbon at the same rate is still up in the air. Previous studies on the topic have yielded conflicting results, says University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor Galen McKinley.

RENO, Nev. – An ambitious University of Nevada, Reno project to understand and characterize geothermal potential at nearly 500 sites throughout the Great Basin is yielding a bounty of information for the geothermal industry to use in developing resources in Nevada, according to a report to the U.S. Department of Energy.