Earth

Scientists have developed a graphene based microphone nearly 32 times more sensitive than microphones of standard nickel-based construction.

The researchers, based at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, created a vibrating membrane - the part of a condenser microphone which converts the sound to a current - from graphene, and were able to show up to 15 dB higher sensitivity compared to a commercial microphone, at frequencies up to 11 kHz.

The results are published today, 27th November 2015, in the journal 2D Materials.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - More than 190 countries are meeting in Paris next week to create a durable framework for addressing climate change and to implement a process to reduce greenhouse gases over time. A key part of this agreement would be the pledges made by individual countries to reduce their emissions.

Two new studies report dramatic changes in phytoplankton abundance and nature, changes that have important implications for storing excess carbon. Collectively, these studies suggest that certain types of carbon-intensive algae are flourishing and will play increasingly prominent roles as carbon pumps, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Using the isotopic signature of phytoplankton amino acids embedded in skeletons of deep water soft corals, Kelton McMahon and colleagues determined how plankton dominance changed in the North Pacific over the past millennium.

Berkeley -- An emerging class of atomically thin materials known as monolayer semiconductors has generated a great deal of buzz in the world of materials science. Monolayers hold promise in the development of transparent LED displays, ultra-high efficiency solar cells, photo detectors and nanoscale transistors. Their downside? The films are notoriously riddled with defects, killing their performance.

A microscopic marine alga is thriving in the North Atlantic to an extent that defies scientific predictions, suggesting swift environmental change as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the ocean, a study led a by Johns Hopkins University scientist has found.

What these findings mean remains to be seen, however, as does whether the rapid growth in the tiny plankton's population is good or bad news for the planet.

Coccolithophores--tiny calcifying plants that are part of the foundation of the marine food web--have been increasing in relative abundance in the North Atlantic over the last 45 years, as carbon input into ocean waters has increased. Their relative abundance has increased 10 times, or by an order of magnitude, during this sampling period. This finding was diametrically opposed to what scientists had expected since coccolithophores make their plates out of calcium carbonate, which is becoming more difficult as the ocean becomes more acidic and pH is reduced.

An international team of researchers has predicted the existence of a new type of particle called the type-II Weyl fermion in metallic materials. When subjected to a magnetic field, the materials containing the particle act as insulators for current applied in some directions and as conductors for current applied in other directions. This behavior suggests a range of potential applications, from low-energy devices to efficient transistors.

Tropical Storm Sandra formed on Nov. 24 and by the morning of Nov. 25 had become an Eastern Pacific Ocean late-season hurricane. NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured imagery of the storm from the time it developed to its status as a hurricane.

On Nov. 24, the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data on Tropical Storm Sandra as it was strengthening. Cloud top temperatures near -63F/-53C indicating powerful thunderstorms circled the center in the northern, eastern and southern quadrants of the storm.

The world-famous Australian reef is providing an effective barrier against landslide-induced tsunamis, new research shows.

What has developed into the Great Barrier Reef was not always a barrier reef - it was once a fringing reef and did not offer the same protective quality. This is because the coast at this time was much closer to the source of the tsunamis, said lead author of the paper, Associate Professor Jody Webster, from the Geocoastal Research Group at the University of Sydney.

Iron oxides occur in nature in many forms, often significantly different from each other in terms of structure and physical properties. However, a new variety of iron oxide, recently created and tested by scientists in Cracow, surprised both physicists and engineers, as it revealed features previously unobserved in any other material.

The world's most powerful accelerator, the 27 km long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating at CERN in Geneva established collisions between lead nuclei, this morning, at the highest energies ever. The LHC has been colliding protons at record high energy since the summer, but now the time has now come to collide large nuclei (nuclei of lead, Pb, consist of 208 neutrons and protons). The experiments aim at understanding and studying the properties of strongly interacting systems at high densities and thus the state of matter of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang.

For fusion reactions to take place efficiently, the atomic nuclei that fuse together in plasma must be kept sufficiently hot. But turbulence in the plasma that flows in facilities called tokamaks can cause heat to leak from the core of the plasma to its outer edge, causing reactions to fizzle out.

A mathematics student has worked out the secrets of how chocolate behaves in a chocolate fountain, answering the age-old question of why the falling 'curtain' of chocolate surprisingly pulls inwards rather than going straight downwards.

The results are published today, 25th November 2015, in European Journal of Physics.

"Chocolate fountains are just cool, aren't they!" says Adam Townsend, an author on the paper, based on his MSci project. "But it's also nice that they're models of some very important aspects of fluid dynamics."

The journey for volcanic rocks found on many volcanic islands began deep within the Earth.

Brought to the Earth's surface in eruptions of deep volcanic material, these rocks hold clues as to what is going on deep beneath Earth's surface.

Studies of rocks found on certain volcanic islands, known as ocean island basalts, revealed that although these erupted rocks originate from Earth's interior, they are not the same chemically.

Mars is blanketed by a thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere--one that is far too thin to prevent large amounts of water on the surface of the planet from subliming or evaporating. But many researchers have suggested that the planet was once shrouded in an atmosphere many times thicker than Earth's. For decades that left the question, "Where did all the carbon go?"