Earth

The earth's climate appears to have been more variable over the past 7,000 years than often thought. This is the conclusion of a new study forthcoming online this week in the U.S. scientific journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS). In the study, scientists from the Potsdam-based Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, and Harvard University show that sea surface temperatures reconstructed from climate archives vary to a much greater extent on long time scales than simulated by climate models.

Washington, D.C.-- A new high-resolution mapping strategy has revealed billions of tons of carbon in Peruvian forests that can be preserved as part of an effort to sequester carbon stocks in the fight against climate change. Tropical forests convert more carbon from the atmosphere into biomass than any other terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. However, when land is used for agriculture, as a wood source, or for mining, carbon is often released into the atmosphere where it contributes to climate change.

A team of scientists has published the most comprehensive picture yet of how acidity levels vary across the world's oceans, providing a benchmark for years to come as enormous amounts of human-caused carbon emissions continue to wind up at sea.

The rapidly melting ice sheets on the coast of West Antarctica are a potential major contributor to rising ocean levels worldwide. Although warm water near the coast is thought to be the main factor causing the ice to melt, the process by which this water ends up near the cold continent is not well understood.

A massive new University of Colorado Boulder study indicates there is a statistical link between hotter temperatures generated by climate change and the risk of armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa.

CU-Boulder Professor John O'Loughlin led a research team that assessed more than 78,000 armed conflicts between 1980 and 2012 in the Sahel region of Africa - a semi-arid belt just south of the Saharan Desert that spans about 3,000 miles and more than a dozen countries from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.

Last year CERN announced the finding of a new elementary particle, the Higgs particle. But maybe it wasn't the Higgs particle, maybe it just looks like it. And maybe it is not alone.

Many calculations indicate that the particle discovered last year in the CERN particle accelerator was indeed the famous Higgs particle. Physicists agree that the CERN experiments did find a new particle that had never been seen before, but according to an international research team, there is no conclusive evidence that the particle was indeed the Higgs particle.

The Earth's ancient oceans held much lower concentrations of sulfate--a key biological nutrient--than previously recognized, according to research published this week in Science.

The findings paint a new portrait of our planet's early biosphere and primitive marine life. Organisms require sulfur as a nutrient, and it plays a central role in regulating atmospheric chemistry and global climate.

A long-held belief that offshore islands protect the mainland from tsunamis turns out to be the exact opposite of the truth, according to a new study.

Common wisdom -- from Southern California to the South Pacific -- for coastal residents and scientists alike has long been that offshore islands would create a buffer that blocked the power of a tsunami. In fact, computer modeling of tsunamis striking a wide variety of different offshore island geometries yielded no situation in which the mainland behind them fared better.

Boulder, Colo., USA - In an urban environment, the effect of a major earthquake such as the 17 Oct. 1989 Loma Prieta event can be pieced together by the infrastructure damaged or destroyed. This study by Kevin M. Schmidt and colleagues details the effects of the Loma Prieta earthquake still detectable 25 years on and sheds light on the potential damage to infrastructure from future earthquakes along the San Andreas fault or the neighboring Foothills thrust belt.

Wriggle your toes in a marsh's mucky bottom sediment and you'll probably inhale a rotten egg smell, the distinctive odor of hydrogen sulfide gas. That's the biochemical signature of sulfur-using bacteria, one of Earth's most ancient and widespread life forms.

The seemingly simple process of phase changes--those transitions between states of matter--is more complex than previously known, according to research based at Princeton University, Peking University and New York University.

NEW YORK (November 6, 2014) -- Inappropriate, disruptive, or hostile behavior between nursing home residents is a sizable and growing problem, according to new research from Weill Cornell Medical College and Cornell University.

PITTSBURGH--Speed is an asset for a predator. Except when that predator runs so fast that it essentially blinds itself.

The tiger beetle, relative to its size, is the fastest creature on Earth. Some of these half-inch-long beetles cover about 120 body lengths per second (at about five miles per hour). The fastest human can do about five body lengths. To take the sprinting gold from the tiger beetle, a person would have to hit 480 miles per hour.

Berlin, Germany (November, 2014) - The dodo is among the most famous extinct creatures, and a poster child for human-caused extinction events. Despite its notoriety, and the fact that the species was alive during recorded human history, little is actually known about how this animal lived, looked, and behaved. A new study of the only known complete skeleton from a single bird takes advantage of modern 3-D laser scanning technology to open a new window into the life of this famous extinct bird.

By combining projections of climate change, emissions reductions and changes in land use across the USA, an international research team estimate that by 2050, cumulative exposure to ozone during the summer will be high enough to damage vegetation.

Although the research findings - published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions - focus on the impact in the USA, they raise wider concerns for global air quality, according to lead researcher Dr Maria Val Martin, from the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering