Earth

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Physical Society has released a new assessment — Direct Air Capture of CO2 with Chemicals — to better inform the scientific community on the technical aspects of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are unlikely to offer an economically feasible way to slow human-driven climate change for several decades, according to a report issued by the American Physical Society and led by Princeton engineer Robert Socolow.

"We humans should not kid ourselves that we can pour all the carbon dioxide we wish into the atmosphere right now and pull it out later at little cost," said Socolow, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Flying the EU flag on public buildings on Europe Day (Monday, 9th May) has no impact on public attitudes to the EU. But EU symbols used in practical ways such as at airport passport controls can polarise attitudes to the EU amongst the Scots and Welsh, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Strathclyde, but have little impact on people in England.

As far back as the 1990s, long before anyone had actually isolated graphene – a honeycomb lattice of carbon just one atom thick – theorists were predicting extraordinary properties at the edges of graphene nanoribbons. Now physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and other institutions, have made the first precise measurements of the "edge states" of well-ordered nanoribbons.

The region east of the central Andes Mountains has the potential for larger scale earthquakes than previously expected, according to a new study posted online in the May 8th edition of Nature Geoscience. Previous research had set the maximum expected earthquake size to be magnitude 7.5, based on the relatively quiet history of seismicity in that area. This new study by researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) and colleagues contradicts that limit and instead suggests that the region could see quakes with magnitudes 8.7 to 8.9.

A panel of some of the world's leading climate and glacier scientists co-chaired by a Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego researcher issued a report today commissioned by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences citing the moral imperative before society to properly address climate change.

The presence of even a simple chemical reaction can delay or prevent the spreading of stored carbon dioxide in underground aquifers, new research from the University of Cambridge has revealed.

The findings may have implications for carbon sequestration in saline aquifers – one of the many methods being explored to mitigate rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Depending on the strength of the reaction between dissolved CO2 and porous rock, the new research shows that distinct scenarios of CO2 transport may occur in deep saline rock formations.

EUGENE, Ore. -- University of Oregon researcher Richard Taylor is on a quest to grow flowers that will help people who've lost their sight, such as those suffering from macular degeneration, to see again.

These flowers are not roses, tulips or columbines. They will be nanoflowers seeded from nano-sized particles of metals that grow, or self assemble, in a natural process -- diffusion limited aggregation. They will be fractals that mimic and communicate efficiently with neurons.

Global warming is likely already taking a toll on world wheat and corn production, according to a new study led by Stanford University researchers. But the United States, Canada and northern Mexico have largely escaped the trend.

"It appears as if farmers in North America got a pass on the first round of global warming," said David Lobell, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University. "That was surprising, given how fast we see weather has been changing in agricultural areas around the world as a whole."

TORONTO, ON – Scientists at the University of Toronto, Stanford and Columbia Universities have developed a way to measure the action and function of candidate prescription drugs on human cells, including the response of individual cells, more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before.

Scientists are reporting an in-depth analysis of how the caffeine in coffee, tea, and other foods seems to protect against conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and heart disease on the most fundamental levels. The report, which describes the chemistry behind caffeine's antioxidant effects, appears in ACS' The Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

Together with Terry Callaghan, a researcher at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Margareta is the editor of the two chapters on snow and permafrost.

"The changes we see are dramatic. And they are not coincidental. The trends are unequivocal and deviate from the norm when compared with a longer term perspective", she says.

A group of 12 biology educators at US colleges and universities that teach mostly undergraduates argues in the May issue of BioScience for coordinating networks to expand the study and teaching of ecology conducted at these institutions. The group, which has launched a network dedicated to continental-scale observations, argues that better coordination of current research efforts will allow "transformative contributions" cost-effectively, while also providing valuable educational experiences for undergraduates.

HOUSTON -- (May 3, 2011) -- A Rice University-led team of physicists this week offered up one of the first theoretical explanations of how two dissimilar types of high-temperature superconductors behave in similar ways.

A team of scientists, including several from the Smithsonian Institution, discovered that leaves of flowering plants in the world's first rainforests had more veins per unit area than leaves ever had before. They suggest that this increased the amount of water available to the leaves, making it possible for plants to capture more carbon and grow larger. A better plumbing system may also have radically altered water and carbon movement through forests, driving environmental change.