Earth

A large team of scientists has nearly completed the first map of the mantle under the tectonic plate that is colliding with the Pacific Northwest and putting Seattle, Portland and Vancouver at risk of the largest earthquakes and tsunamis in the world.

A new report from five members of the mapping team describes how the movement of the ocean-bottom Juan de Fuca plate is connected to the flow of the mantle 150 kilometers (100 miles) underground, which could help seismologists understand the forces generating quakes as large as the destructive Tohoku quake that struck Japan in 2011.

Baltimore, MD, USA - The Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ) has captured major attention from paleoseismologists due to evidence from several large (magnitude 8-9) earthquakes preserved in coastal salt marshes. Stratigraphic records are proving to be useful for learning about the CSZ's past, and microfossils may provide more answers about large ancient earthquakes. They may also allow modelers to learn more about potential major hazards related to earthquakes in the area, which would contribute to public preparedness for such events.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- New research by a Florida State University chemistry professor uses some of the world's most powerful magnets to put a bullseye on the flu virus.

Ancient pollen reveals droughts between Sierra Nevada glacier surges

Boulder, CO, USA - Hidden below the surface of California's Central Valley are pollen grains from the Pleistocene that are providing scientists with clues to the severity of droughts that struck the region between glacial periods.

New research led by physicists at the University of Warwick has used tools designed to study social networks to gain significant new insights into the Northern Lights, and space weather - particularly the interaction of events in the sun's atmosphere with Earth's ionosphere.

The research team used data from over 100 individual magnetometers located at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. These magnetometers have been used for decades to track space weather but it is only recently that the data from all these devices has been collected in one place in the SuperMAG project.

Methane hydrates are a kind of ice that contains methane, and thatform at certain depths under the sea or buried in permafrost. They can also form in pipelines that transport oil and gas, leading to clogging. Yet methane hydrates are nearly impossible to study because it is very hard to get samples, and the samples themselves are highly unstable in the laboratory.

Boulder, CO, USA - For the millions of people who live in its expansive coastal areas, Chesapeake Bay provides an important source of income and recreational enjoyment. To protect the ecosystem and the livelihood of area residents, it is important to assess how climate variability and change will affect Chesapeake Bay's shallow water ecosystems and water quality.

The intensity, duration, and frequency of extreme temperature- and precipitation-based events are key components to understanding the climate of Chesapeake Bay.

Alligators and the Everglades go hand-in-hand, and as water conditions change in the greater Everglades ecosystem, gators are one of the key species that could be affected.

The role of FIH-1 in the regulation of HIF-1 transcriptional activity has been known for some time, but is limited to the understanding that in the nucleus FIH-1 hydrolyzes asparagine at the C-terminus of HIF-1α to prevent the interaction between HIF-1α and associated cofactors, resulting in suppressed activation of HIF-1. FIH-1 is a cytoplasmic protein. When does FIH-1 move into the nucleus? This was specifically addressed in Dr. Y.

Designing alloys to withstand extreme environments is a fundamental challenge for materials scientists. Energy from radiation can create imperfections in alloys, so researchers in an Energy Frontier Research Center led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are investigating ways to design structural materials that develop fewer, smaller flaws under irradiation. The key, they report in the journal Nature Communications, is exploiting the complexity that is present when alloys are made with equal amounts of up to four different metallic elements.

Being the most popular type of wireless systems, the cellular communications continuously increase their demands for confidentiality of traffic data of mobile subscribers. The Wireless Key Distribution is one of the most promising and fast growing areas in modern applied cryptography.

The area covers various techniques of secure secret key distribution between two legitimate users who share a common radio channel with unpredictable signal fading in a multipath environment.

Research by a UCLA geologist and colleagues could give builders and urban planners more detailed information about how susceptible areas are to landslides and earthquakes.

The study, by Seulgi Moon, a UCLA assistant professor of geology, and colleagues at MIT and the University of Wyoming, is published Oct. 30 in the journal Science. Their findings also could help predict the characteristics of reservoirs that hold groundwater, and identify hills and mountains that are unstable and could be prone to landslides.

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special feature of 46 articles that present the results obtained by the Rosetta mission before the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko reached its perihelion.

University of Wyoming geoscientists have discovered that the underground water-holding capacity of mountain watersheds may be controlled by stresses in the earth's crust. The results, which may have important ramifications for understanding streamflow and aquifer systems in upland watersheds, appears Oct. 30 in Science, one of the world's leading scientific journals.

Boulder, CO, USA - Northwestern University researchers have turned to an unusual source -- Major League Baseball -- to help learn why maps used to predict shaking in future earthquakes often do poorly.