Earth

Researchers may have solved one of the biggest mysteries in geology - why tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface, which normally shift over the course of tens to hundreds of millions of years, sometimes move abruptly.

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the answer comes down to two things: thick crustal plugs and weakened mineral grains. Those effects, acting together, may explain a range of relatively speedy moves among tectonic plates around the world, from Hawaii to East Timor.

In big sagebrush country, re-establishing the ecosystem's namesake shrub may jump-start the recovery process more successfully after oil and gas development than sowing grass-dominated reclamation seed mixes typically used to quickly re-vegetate bare soil on well pads, report two Colorado scientists in the January 2015 issue of Ecological Applications.

A new analysis of seven years of bird sightings by citizen scientist birdwatchers from the Seattle Audubon Society has found positive trends in several Puget Sound seabird species that had been in historic decline. The study tracked the occurrence of 18 seabird species at 62 sites around Puget Sound and found increased presence of 14 species, including cormorants, loons, rhinoceros auklets, and harlequin ducks. It also documented local hotspots for certain species, which may reflect especially important habitat or prey the birds depend on.

Pallid sturgeon come from a genetic line that has lived on this planet for tens of millions of years; yet it has been decades since anyone has documented any of the enormous fish successfully producing young that survive to adulthood in the upper Missouri River basin.

p>[EMBARGOED UNTIL THURSDAY, JAN. 22] Taking antibiotics for diarrhea may put travelers visiting developing parts of the world at higher risk for contracting superbugs and spreading these daunting drug-resistant bacteria to their home countries, according to a new study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and now available online.

Does glass ever stop flowing? Researchers at the University of Bristol and Kyoto University have combined computer simulation and information theory, originally invented for telephone communication and cryptography, to answer this puzzling question.

Watching a glass blower at work we can clearly see the liquid nature of hot glass. Once the glass has cooled down to room temperature though, it has become solid and we can pour wine in it or make window panes out of it.

A Wake Forest University study to investigate the effects of acute beetroot juice ingestion on the exercise capacity of COPD patients shows some promise, but a larger clinical trial is needed to verify results.

The new research, published online ahead of print in the journal Nitric Oxide: Biology and Chemistry, looked at a small group of COPD patients who drank beetroot juice as compared to a placebo drink before exercise.

An international team of scientists has taken a new path in the research into causes of epilepsy: The researchers determined the networks of the active genes and, like a dragnet, looked for the "main perpetrators" using a computer model. In doing so, they discovered the molecule sestrin-3 as a central switch. In animal models, the scientists were able to demonstrate that inhibition of sestrin-3 leads to a reduction in seizures.

Lorentz invariance (LI) is a cornerstone of modern physics, and strongly supported by observations.

In fact, all the experiments carried out so far are consistent with it, and no evidence to show that such a symmetry needs to be broken at a certain energy scale. Nevertheless, there are various reasons to construct gravitational theories with broken LI. In particular, our understanding of space-times at Plank scale is still highly limited, and the renomalizability and unitarity of gravity often lead to the violation of LI.

Imagine if every time you filled your car with gas, a few gallons didn't make it into the tank and instead spilled onto the ground. That's essentially what happens every day with the aging system of underground pipes and tanks that delivers natural gas to Boston-area households and businesses, with adverse economic, public health, and environmental consequences. Now a group of atmospheric scientists at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has produced hard numbers that quantify the extent of the problem.

A research team has developed a new technique for determining the role that a material's structure has on the efficiency of organic solar cells, which are candidates for low-cost, next generation solar power that would be superior to current solar technology and its environmentally costly mining and manufacturing process.

In literature, crows and ravens are a bad omen and are associated with witches. Most people believe they steal, eat other birds' eggs and reduce the populations of other birds. But a new study, which has brought together over 326 interactions between corvids and their prey, demonstrates that their notoriety is not entirely merited.

Recent research shows that mild infections without symptoms of illness can still lead to serious consequences by reducing the lifespan of malaria-infected migratory birds. The infection is thought to speed up the ageing process by shortening the telomeres (i.e., the chromosomes ends) at a faster rate and thereby accelerating senescence.

Bacteria communicate by means of chemical signals and can develop common characteristics through this "agreement" and also develop their potential pathogenic effects in this way. Scientists working with Dr. Helge B. Bode, an Merck-endowed professor for molecular biotechnology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and Dr. Ralf Heermann from the department of microbiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, have now described a hitherto unknown communication pathway that appears to be widely distributed.

scientists have experimentally observed for the first time a phenomenon in ultracold, three-atom molecules predicted by Russian theoretical physicsist Vitaly Efimov in 1970. "Quantum theory makes the existence of these gigantic molecules inevitiable, provided proper--and quite challenging--conditions are created," said Efimov, of the University of Washington.

In this quantum phenomenon, called geometric scaling, the triatomic molecules fit inside one another like an infinitely large set of Russian nesting dolls.