Earth

For millions of years global climate change has altered the structure and internal movement of mountain ranges, but the resulting glacial development and erosion can in turn change a mountain's local climate. The degree of this cause-and-effect relationship has never been clearly observed, until now.

Snails have been hailed as nutritious delicacies, providing early humans with part of their healthy diet for thousands of years. But more recently, the shells left behind by pre-historic snails are providing scientists with clues to ancient environmental conditions.

Existing research tells us that during the Holocene period (last 11,500 years) personal lifestyles changed from strictly hunting and gathering to the beginning of agricultural food production. But why?

The Swedish government is investigating a change of legislation to make surrogate motherhood permitted in Sweden. A Nordic research team, which compiled the scientific knowledge, has established that surrogacy as a rule works well for the child and the surrogate mother.

Surrogate motherhood means that a woman becomes pregnant and expects a child in order to give the child to another woman or another couple. This method is used in many European countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland.

Humans can help the critically endangered Saimaa ringed seal to cope with climate change. Man-made snow drifts developed in a recent study from the University of Eastern Finland improved the breeding success of seals during winters with poor snow conditions.

MIAMI - A new analysis using changes in cloud cover over the tropical Indo-Pacific Ocean showed that a weakening of a major atmospheric circulation system over the last century is due, in part, to increased greenhouse gas emissions. The findings from researchers at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science provide new evidence that climate change in the tropical Pacific will result in changes in rainfall patterns in the region and amplify warming near the equator in the future.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.-- Supervolcanoes, massive eruptions with potential global consequences, appear not to follow the conventional volcano mechanics of internal pressure building until the volcano blows. Instead, a new study finds, such massive magma chambers might erupt when the roof above them cracks or collapses.

UPTON, NY-Peering at the debris from particle collisions that recreate the conditions of the very early universe, scientists have for the first time measured the force of interaction between pairs of antiprotons. Like the force that holds ordinary protons together within the nuclei of atoms, the force between antiprotons is attractive and strong.

HOUSTON - (Nov. 4, 2015) - Due to the diligence of a Rice University student and his calculations, humanity now knows a little more about the universe.

Kefeng Xin, a graduate student at Rice, is one of a handful of primary authors who revealed evidence this week that the attractive force between antiprotons is similar to that between protons -- and measured it.

To some, holidays such as Bastille Day, Independence Day, and New Year's Eve, as well as major sporting events, wouldn't be the same without fireworks. But in a new Weather article, Dr. Francis Pope and his colleagues highlight the negative effects of fireworks on visibility and short-term air quality.

Baltimore, MD, USA: A technique for identifying the sources of diamonds without the use of clues such as the presence of specific inclusions will be reported on Wednesday, Nov. 4, in a presentation by Catherine McManus, Chief Scientist at Materialytics, LLC, at The Geological Society of America's Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The new testing method produced results with average accuracy around 98%.

Argonne physicists are using Mira to perform simulations of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments with a leadership-class supercomputer for the first time, shedding light on a path forward for interpreting future LHC data. Researchers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) helped the team optimize their code for the supercomputer, which has enabled them to simulate billions of particle collisions faster than ever before.

A continuing look at a Maya village in El Salvador--frozen in time by a blanket of volcanic ash from 1,400 years ago--shows the farming families who lived there went about their daily lives with virtually no strong-arming by the elite royalty lording over the valley.

Instead, archaeological evidence indicates significant interactions at the village of Ceren took place among families, village elders, craftspeople and specialty maintenance workers. This research comes from a new University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) study, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Athens, Ga. - Evidence has been mounting that female monarch butterflies are better at flying and more successful at migration than males, and researchers from the University of Georgia have now come up with an explanation--but not one they expected.

In the study comparing physical traits of female and male monarchs, they found that although female monarchs have smaller wings and smaller flight muscles than males, their wings are thicker and also bear less weight per square inch, making them both sturdier and more efficient in flight.

Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 2015 - On a serendipitous occasion, while attending a conference and listening to Rishi Raj, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, speak about the remarkable effect of moderate electrical fields on lowering the sintering temperature of certain ceramic powders, Himanshu Jain, a professor of materials science and engineering at Lehigh University, began to wonder if a similar phenomenon was possible in a glass -- because he knew that the implications could be huge for glass technology.

WASHINGTON, DC -- Some substitutes for ozone-damaging chemicals being phased out worldwide under international agreements are themselves potent greenhouse gases and contribute to warming. Now, a new study published Nov. 2 in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, shows for the first time how some of those replacement chemicals can break down in the atmosphere to form a greenhouse gas that can persist for millennia, much longer than the substitute chemicals themselves.