Earth

One may think that the extreme north of Europe is low in insect life, except for the notorious blood-sucking flies. However, while it is a generally accepted truth that both plant and animal species' count is higher the closer one gets to the Equator, some insects display anomalous diversity gradient. Such is the case for European fungus gnats, for example, a highly diverse group of true flies. No less than about 1000 species are known to occur in the Scandinavian Peninsula, representing about 83% of the continent's total.

Hurricane Sandy became the second costliest hurricane to hit the United States when it blew ashore in October 2012, killing 159 people and inflicting $71 billion in damage. Informally known as a "superstorm" after it made landfall, Sandy was so destructive largely because of its unusual size and track. After moving north from the tropical waters where it spawned, Sandy turned out to sea before hooking back west, growing in size and crashing head-on into the East Coast, gaining strength when it merged with an eastbound mid-latitude storm.

Promiscuity could reduce benefits of successful mating, research shows.

Mating with a large number of partners may not be as good an indicator of success as it appears, new research has shown.

Instead, males that mate with multiple partners may actually experience a reduction in paternity rates, due to sperm competition, as their partners will also mate with many other males.

The innovative research project was carried out by scientists from the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus, in Cornwall.

A true-muonium only lives for two microseconds. These atoms are made up one positively and one negatively charged elementary particle, also known as muons. Although they have yet to be observed experimentally, a Japanese theoretical physicist has come up with new ways of creating them, in principle, via particle collisions. The first method involves colliding a negatively charged muon and a muonium atom made up of a positive muon and an electron. The second involves colliding a positively charged muon and a muonic hydrogen atom made up of a proton and a negative muon.

Scientists at the University of New Mexico conducted research to effectively study carbon emissions through fault systems in the East African Rift (EAR) in an effort to understand carbon emissions from the Earth's interior and how it affects the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) from Earth's interior is thought to be released into the atmosphere mostly via degassing from active volcanoes. CO2 can also escape along faults away from active volcanic centers. However, such tectonic degassing is poorly constrained, and to date has been largely unmeasured.

Diamonds dug up from ancient rock formations in the Johannesburg area, between 1890 and 1930 - before the industrialisation of gold mining - have revealed secrets of how the Earth worked more than 3.5 billion years ago.

Since the dawn of time, humans have endeavoured to unravel the laws governing the physical world around us. Over centuries we have tried to discover a Theory of Everything.

Possible candidates for this cachet, such as String Theory and Grand Unified Theory, require higher dimensions or higher-dimensional symmetries, for instance ten dimensions, despite their radical difference from the world we actually experience.

HOUSTON - (Jan. 19, 2016) - The same slip-and-stick mechanism that leads to earthquakes is at work on the molecular level in nanoscale materials, where it determines the shear plasticity of the materials, according to scientists at Rice University and the State University of Campinas, Brazil.

The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan found that random molecules scattered within layers of otherwise pristine graphene affect how the layers interact with each other under strain.

The most efficient way to clean up ocean plastics and avoid harming ecosystems is to place plastic collectors near coasts, according to a new study.

Plastic floating in the oceans is a widespread and increasing problem. Plastics including bags, bottle caps and plastic fibres from synthetic clothes wash out into the oceans from urban rivers, sewers and waste deposits.

Around 720-640 million years ago, much of the Earth's surface was covered in ice during a glaciation that lasted millions of years. Explosive underwater volcanoes were a major feature of this 'Snowball Earth', according to new research led by the University of Southampton.

Thanks to the Internet, amateur volunteers known as "citizen scientists" can readily donate their time and effort to science--in fields ranging from medicine to zoology to astrophysics. The astrophysics project Space Warps offers a compelling example of why citizen science has become such a popular tool and how valuable it can be.

Boulder, Colorado, USA - Today, people are major agents of landscape change and catalysts for erosion, but what did people do to the environment before the industrial revolution -- before mechanized agriculture? The impact that indigenous peoples had on their landscapes, and when, are often difficult to determine. In this article for Geology, Eric W. Portenga and colleagues show that the use of fire by native Australians had little impact on the erosion of the landscapes they inhabited.

NASA has provided forecasters with a variety of data on the out-of-season tropical cyclone Alex. The AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided valuable temperature data, the RapidScat instrument identified the strongest winds, the GPM core satellite provided rainfall rates and cloud heights, and NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible image of the storm.

Alex is a Rare Storm

Alexandria, VA - Toba volcano erupted 74,000 years ago, and is thought to have been the largest eruption in the last 2.5 million years. Some scientists have thought the fallout from the eruption caused a volcanic winter so catastrophic it almost drove humans to extinction. A new high-resolution study of lake sediments from East Africa disputes that idea, however, suggesting that the early humans in the area probably experienced little or no cooling following the massive eruption.

Imagery from NOAA's GOES-West satellite has shown that former Hurricane Pali has petered out near the Equator.

The NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland created an image of the remnant clouds of former Hurricane Pali from NOAA's GOES-West satellite data. The image was taken on Jan. 15 at 1200 UTC (7 a.m. EST) and showed the elongated former tropical cyclone just north of the Equator.