Earth

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Kent State University a $300,000 grant for three College of Arts and Sciences faculty members to study how human dynamics across social media and social networks can be modeled. The grant is part of a $999,887 collaboration with San Diego State University and the University of Arkansas.

NOAA and its partners today released three-dimensional sonar maps and images of an immigrant steamship lost more than 100 years ago in what many consider the worst maritime disaster in San Francisco history.

On Feb. 22, 1901, in a dense morning fog, the SS City of Rio de Janeiro struck jagged rocks near the present site of the Golden Gate Bridge and sank almost immediately, killing 128 of the 210 passengers and crew aboard the ship.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and Qatar University have developed a new "high-entropy" metal alloy that has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than any other existing metal material.

High-entropy alloys are materials that consist of five or more metals in approximately equal amounts. These alloys are currently the focus of significant attention in materials science and engineering because they can have desirable properties.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Nitrous oxide (N2O) is an important greenhouse gas that doesn't receive as much notoriety as carbon dioxide or methane, but a new study confirms that atmospheric levels of N2O rose significantly as the Earth came out of the last ice age and addresses the cause.

Clathrates are now known to store enormous quantities of methane and other gases in the permafrost as well as in vast sediment layers hundreds of metres deep at the bottom of the ocean floor. Their potential decomposition could therefore have significant consequences for our planet, making an improved understanding of their properties a key priority.

An anomaly spotted at the Large Hadron Collider has prompted scientists to reconsider a mathematical description of the underlying physics. By considering two forces that are distinct in everyday life but unified under extreme conditions like those within the collider and just after the birth of the universe, they have simplified one description of the interactions of elementary particles.

HOUSTON - (Dec. 10, 2014) - Like a baseball player sliding into third, a hot monomer skids in a straight line along a cold surface until it's safely among its fellow molecules.

This is not what usually happens when scientists assemble monomers to make thin films for next-generation electronics, but the details remained a puzzle until a team led by Rice University got involved. Monomers are organic molecules that, in this application, form clusters and eventually complete layers.

This news release is available in German.

New research published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society A by members of the Mathematical Soft Matter Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University examines the energies at work in a closed flexible loop spanned by a soap film. While the underlying experiments are simple enough to be replicated in a kitchen sink, the research generates potentially important questions and changes how we think about different disciplines from material science to vertebrate morphogenesis.

HOUSTON - (Dec. 10, 2014) - Researchers at Rice University have created flexible, patterned sheets of multilayer graphene from a cheap polymer by burning it with a computer-controlled laser. The process works in air at room temperature and eliminates the need for hot furnaces and controlled environments, and it makes graphene that may be suitable for electronics or energy storage.

A new policy paper by a University of York academic calls for limits on the influence of the drinks industry in shaping alcohol policy because it has a 'fundamental conflict of interest'.

The article by Professor Jim McCambridge, of the Department of Health Sciences at York and academics at King's College London and the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, is published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

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Boulder, Colo., USA - In the late 13th century, Kublai Khan, ruler of the Mongol Empire, launched one of the world's largest armada of its time in an attempt to conquer Japan. Early narratives describe the decimation and dispersal of these fleets by the "Kamikaze" of CE 1274 and CE 1281 -- a pair of intense typhoons divinely sent to protect Japan from invasion.

Glass is mysterious. It is a broad class of materials that extends well beyond the everyday window pane, but one thing that these disparate glasses seem to have in common is that they have nothing in common when it comes to their internal structures, especially in contrast with highly ordered and patterned crystals. Glassy systems can also range in scale: from things like metallic glasses, composed of atoms, to sandcastles, composed of grains of sand.

PITTSBURGH (December 9, 2014) ... Precious elements such as platinum work well as catalysts in chemical reactions, but require large amounts of metal and can be expensive. However, computational modeling below the nanoscale level may allow researchers to design more efficient and affordable catalysts from gold.