Earth

Researchers at the University of Leicester and the University of Ferrara in Italy have collaborated to develop new drugs which have the potential to relieve cancer pain without causing many of the side effects of current pain-treatments like morphine.

In nature, random signals often fall mysteriously in step. Fireflies flashing sporadically in early evening soon flash together, and the same harmonic behavior can be seen in chirping crickets, firing neurons, swinging clock pendulums and now, it turns out, rupturing earthquake faults.

DURHAM, N.C. – For decades, oceanographers have embraced the idea that Earth's ocean currents operate like a giant conveyor belt, overturning to continuously transport deep, cold polar waters toward the equator and warm equatorial surface waters back toward the poles along narrow boundary currents. The model held that the conveyor belt was driven by changes in the temperature and salinity of the surface waters at high latitudes.

The first comprehensive synthesis on the effects of climate change on the world's oceans has found they are now changing at a rate not seen for several million years.

In an article published today in Science magazine, scientists reveal the growing atmospheric concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet.

Increasingly, the Earth's climate appears to be more connected than anyone would have imagined. El Niño, the weather pattern that originates in a patch of the equatorial Pacific, can spawn heat waves and droughts as far away as Africa.

Numerous studies are documenting the growing effects of climate change, carbon dioxide, pollution and other human-related phenomena on the world's oceans. But most of those have studied single, isolated sources of pollution and other influences.

Now, a marine geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has published a report in the latest issue of the journal Science that evaluates the total impact of such factors on the ocean and considers what the future might hold.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Increasingly, the Earth's climate appears to be more connected than anyone would have imagined. El Nino, the weather pattern that originates in a patch of the equatorial Pacific, can spawn heat waves and droughts as far away as Africa.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Physicists at Harvard University have, for the first time, tracked individual atoms in a gas cooled to extreme temperatures as the particles reorganized into a crystal, a process driven by quantum mechanics. The research, described this week in the journal Science, opens new possibilities for particle-by-particle study and engineering of artificial quantum materials.

Millions of years ago, volcanic eruptions in North America were more explosive and may have significantly affected the environment and the global climate. So scientists report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The researchers found the remains--deposited in layers of rocks--of eruptions of volcanoes located on North America's northern high plains that spewed massive amounts of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere 40 million years ago. The scientists conducted their research at Scotts Bluff National Monument, Neb., and in surrounding areas.

KNOXVILLE -- Some bacteria destroy oil and those bacteria could lead oil companies to change their methods of harvesting the energy of the oil while at the same time reducing the carbon dioxide that burning oil and gasoline discharges into the atmosphere, says Steve Larter, professor of geoscience and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Petroleum Geology at the University of Calgary, ho was the keynote speaker today for the 2010 Goldschmidt Conference hosted by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"Posidonia oceánica can act as an environmental tracer, reflecting different levels of local and regional pollution", Antonio Tovar-Sánchez, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Global Change research department at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (CSIC-UIB), tells SINC.

RENO, Nev. – After a succession of eight separate earthquake simulations, a 110-foot long, 200-ton concrete bridge model at the University of Nevada, Reno withstood a powerful jolting, three times the acceleration of the disastrous 1994 magnitude 6.9 Northridge, Calif. earthquake, and survived in good condition.

COLLEGE STATION, June 14, 2010 - Haze, scientifically known as atmospheric aerosols - microscopic particles suspended in the Earth's atmosphere - represents a major environmental problem because it degrades visibility, affects human health and influences the climate. Despite its profound impacts, how the haze is formed is not fully understood, says a Texas A&M University professor of atmospheric sciences and chemistry who has studied air chemistry for more than 20 years.

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