Earth

All over the planet, every day, oceans send plumes of sea spray into the atmosphere. Beyond the poetry of crashing ocean waves, this salt- and carbon-rich spray has a dramatic effect on the formation and duration of clouds.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Dec. 21, 2015)-- The amount of methane gas escaping from the ground during the long cold period in the Arctic each year and entering Earth's atmosphere is likely much higher than estimated by current climate change models, concludes a major new study led by San Diego State University.

HANOVER, N.H. - The melting of sea ice will significantly increase Arctic precipitation, creating a climate feedback comparable to doubling global carbon dioxide, a Dartmouth College-led study finds.

"The increases of precipitation and changes in the energy balance may create significant uncertainty in climate predictions," says lead author Ben Kopec, a PhD candidate in Dartmouth's Department of Earth Sciences.

Forests help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by storing it in trees, but a sizeable amount of the greenhouse gas actually escapes through the soil and into rivers and streams.

That's the main finding of a paper to appear Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's the first study to comprehensively look at how carbon moves in freshwater across the entire U.S.

Prehistoric human populations of hunter-gatherers in a region of North America grew at the same rate as farming societies in Europe, according to a new radiocarbon analysis involving researchers from the University of Wyoming and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The findings challenge the commonly held view that the advent of agriculture 10,000-12,000 years ago accelerated human population growth. The research is reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a major scientific journal.

Although they don't currently have as much conductivity, solid-state electrolytes designed for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are emerging as a safer alternative to their more prevalent--sometimes flammable--liquid-electrolyte counterparts.

However, a new study conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility, has revealed promising results that could drastically boost the performance of solid-state electrolytes, and could potentially lead to a safer, even more efficient battery.

A research paper published today in Nature Climate Change predicts widespread death of needleleaf evergreen trees (NET) within the Southwest United States by the year 2100 under projected global warming scenarios.

The research team that conducted the study, which includes University of Delaware's Sara Rauscher, considered both field results and a range of validated regional predictions and global simulation models of varying complexity, in reaching this grim conclusion.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Making an incredibly fast photodetector is one thing, but actually measuring its speed is another.

Graduate student Haining Wang came up with an inventive way of measuring the near-instantaneous electrical current generated using a light detector that he and a team of Cornell engineers made using an atomically thin material.

Workforce homogeneity limits creativity, discovery, and job satisfaction; nonetheless, eighty-one percent of US science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) university faculty members are men. The relative dearth of women in the field is a long-recognized problem--but it's one that may be on its way to a solution. Using a three-step intervention derived from self-determination theory, an interdisciplinary team from Montana State University demonstrated a low-cost way to improve gender diversity in STEM-faculty hiring.

Perovskites are materials used in batteries, fuel cells, and electronic components, and occur in nature as minerals. Despite their important role in technology, little is known about the reactivity of their surfaces. Professor Ulrike Diebold's team at TU Wien (Vienna) has answered a long-standing question using scanning tunnelling microscopes and computer simulations: How do water molecules behave when they attach to a perovskite surface? Normally only the outermost atoms at the surface influence this behaviour, but on perovskites the deeper layers are important, too.

Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 21, 2015 -- Physicists at the Diocles Extreme Light Laboratory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have demonstrated that their unconventional laser-based X-ray machine could provide a new defense against nuclear terrorism.

In proof-of-principle experiments, the UNL scientists used the laser-driven X-ray source to produce an image of a uranium disk no bigger than a stack of three nickels and hidden between 3-inch steel panels.

• Birds generate their colour using structure, not dyes and pigments
• The Jay is able to change the colour of its feathers along the equivalent of a single human hair using a tuneable nanostructure
• This discovery may lead to synthetic structural colour that could be made cheaply and used in paints and clothes that will not fade like dyes and pigments.

Climate change is rapidly heating up lakes around the world, threatening freshwater supplies and ecosystems across the planet, according to a study spanning six continents.

More than 60 scientists took part in the research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and announced today at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

MADISON, Wis. - Ongoing studies of a massive volcanic field in the Andes mountains show that the rapid uplift which has raised the surface more than six feet in eight years has occurred many times during the past 10,000 years.

Estimates of future global temperatures based on recent observations must account for the differing characteristics of each important driver of recent climate change, according to a new NASA study published Dec. 14 in the journal Nature Climate Change.