Earth

NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of newborn Tropical Cyclone Victor in the South Pacific Ocean. On Jan. 15 a gale warning was in effect for Rakahanga, Manihiki, Suwarrow, Nassau and Pukapuka in the Northern Cook Islands.

Washington, D.C., January 12, 2016 - As we continue to shrink electronic components, top-down manufacturing methods begin to approach a physical limit at the nanoscale. Rather than continue to chip away at this limit, one solution of interest involves using the bottom-up self-assembly of molecular building blocks to build nanoscale devices.

Researchers have developed a family of reagents that can add tight, ring-shaped structures that boost a drug's beneficial properties to a wide variety of drug candidates. Critically, the synthesis of the ring structure significantly reduces the multiple steps required in previous methods, a barrier that has sometimes resulted in the discontinuation of drug development in the past. Ring structures are appealing additions to help optimize a drug's properties. For example they can help limit unwanted clearance of the drug from the body.

If you haven't already heard of antiferromagnetic spintronics it won't be long before you do. This relatively unused class of magnetic materials could be about to transform our digital lives. They have the potential to make our devices smaller, faster, more robust and increase their energy efficiency.

LA JOLLA, CA--January 14, 2016--Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a new and widely applicable technique for building potential drug molecules and other organic compounds.

If you put a microphone underwater near the oyster reef in North Carolina's Pamlico Sound, you can hear it: a crisp, crackling noise that sounds like someone just dumped a ton of Rice Krispies into the ocean. But it isn't cereal making that noise - it's thousands of small creatures known as snapping shrimp. Researchers believe that their noisemaking habits could play several key roles within the reef, including serving as an auditory indicator of the underwater ecosystem's health.

Researchers have found clear evidence that communities rich in species are substantially healthier and more productive than those depleted of species, once complicating factors are removed. An international group of scientists led by USGS research ecologist Jim Grace has solved this long-standing ecological riddle using new scientific techniques for analyzing complex data to determine: How do we know that conserving biodiversity is actually important in the real world?

A new Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego-led study measured a melt rate that is 25 times higher than expected on one part of the Ross Ice Shelf. The study suggests that high, localized melt rates such as this one on Antarctica's largest and most stable ice shelf are normal and keep Antarctica's ice sheets in balance.

The Ross Ice Shelf, a floating body of land ice the size of France jutting out from the Antarctic mainland, continuously melts and grows in response to changes to both the ice sheet feeding it and the warmer Southern Ocean waters beneath it.

Rats can absorb disease agents from their local environment and spread them, according to a new UBC study. The results also indicate that the threat rats pose to the health of poultry and humans has been underestimated.

A team of authors from MIPT, Kansas State University, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have demonstrated that it is possible to fully absorb electromagnetic radiation using an anisotropic crystal. The observations are of fundamental importance for electrodynamics and will provide researchers with an entirely new method of absorbing the energy of electromagnetic waves. The paper has been published in Physical Review B.

A new study by NOAA researchers suggests future warming of ocean waters off the Northeastern U.S. may be greater and occur at an even faster rate than previously projected.

Their findings, based on output from four global climate models of varying ocean and atmospheric resolution, indicate that ocean temperature in the U.S. Northeast Shelf is projected to warm twice as fast as previously projected and almost three times faster than the global average. The models were developed at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey.

Photovoltaics? On perovskites produced by mechanochemistry!

Perovskites, substances that perfectly absorb light, are the future of solar energy. The opportunity for their rapid dissemination has just increased thanks to a cheap and environmentally safe method of production of these materials, developed by chemists from Warsaw, Poland. Rather than in solutions at a high temperature, perovskites can now be synthesized by solid-state mechanochemical processes: by grinding powders.

ALBANY, Calif. -- Rising temperatures can create stressful and possibly lethal stream habitat for native trout. To help understand the interactive effects of climate warming and livestock grazing on water temperature, researchers from the Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) and University of California, Berkeley, conducted a six-year study documenting high elevation water temperatures in areas of the Golden Trout Wilderness.

The year 2016 is an Olympic year. Developments in high-performance swimwear for swimming continue to advance, along with other areas of scientific research. One area of research has focused on which type of crawl stroke is more effective--when the arm draws a curve in the water (S-stroke) or moves straight (I-stroke)--long a matter of debate in the world of competitive swimming.

New research indicates that asthma in many adolescents is not likely to involve inflammation of the airways and therefore should not be considered an allergic disease.

For the study, investigators assessed clinical characteristics and inflammatory markers in 77 adolescents with asthma and compared them with those found in 68 healthy participants aged 12 to 17 years. The presence of asthma did not appear to involve eosinophils or neutrophils, specific types of white blood cells that are present in higher concentrations in response to inflammation.