Earth

MADISON, Wis. – Scientists today disclosed a new method to convert lignin, a biomass waste product, into simple chemicals. The innovation is an important step toward replacing petroleum-based fuels and chemicals with biorenewable materials, says Shannon Stahl, an expert in "green chemistry" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Today's natural resource manager tending to the health of a stream in Louisiana needs to look upstream. Way upstream - like Montana. Michigan State University (MSU) scientists have invented a way to more easily manage the extensive nature of streams.

There are 2.6 million stream reaches in the contiguous United States that are intricately interconnected. It's impossible to address the health of one reach without knowing what's happening upstream.

Boulder, Colorado, USA – Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park is an iconic American landscape: It is a sub-alpine meadow surrounded by glacially sculpted granitic outcrops in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Because of its accessibility and aesthetic appeal, it is a focal point for both vacationers (up to 4,200 people per day) and geoscientists. It also has historical significance: The idea for a Yosemite National Park came to John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson over a campfire there.

In this month's issue of Physics World, James Dacey explores the ways in which physicists are bridging the "valley of death" to take their innovations from the lab into the commercial market.

Dacey argues that the gruelling challenge facing all start-up companies as they move from prototype to product is somewhat harder for physicists because of two main factors: physics-based inventions are usually far from market-ready when initially proposed and they often turn out to be a lot more complicated than had been originally thought.

Two photons in free space do not interact. Light waves can pass through each other without having any influence on each other at all. For many applications in quantum technology, however, interaction between photons is crucial. It is an indispensable prerequisite for transmitting information through tap-proof quantum channels or for building optical logic gates. At the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), scientists have now succeeded in establishing a strong interaction between two single photons. This opens up completely new possibilities for quantum optics.

A disappearing act was the last thing Rice University physicist Randy Hulet expected to see in his ultracold atomic experiments, but that is what he and his students produced by colliding pairs of Bose Einstein condensates (BECs) that were prepared in special states called solitons.

Hulet's team documented the strange phenomenon in a new study published online this week in the journal Nature Physics.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool have found an unusual mass of rock deep in the active fault line beneath Chile which influenced the rupture size of a massive earthquake that struck the region in 2010.

AUSTIN, Texas— A new analysis of geologic history may help solve the riddle of the "Cambrian explosion," the rapid diversification of animal life in the fossil record 530 million years ago that has puzzled scientists since the time of Charles Darwin.

Thomas Bugnyar and his team have been studying the behavior of approximately 300 wild ravens in the Northern Austrian Alps for years. They observed that ravens slowly build alliances through affiliative interactions such as grooming and playing. However, they also observed that these affiliative interactions were regularly interrupted by a third individual. Although in about 50 % of the cases these interventions were successful and broke up the two affiliating ravens, intervening can be potentially risky when the two affiliating ravens team up and chase away the intervening individual.

The Antarctic ozone hole reached its annual peak size on Sept. 11, according to scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The size of this year's hole was 24.1 million square kilometers (9.3 million square miles) — an area roughly the size of North America.

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin is famous for its ice fishers — the stalwarts who drill holes through lake ice in the hope of catching a winter dinner. Less well known are the state's big-league ice drillers — specialists who design huge drills and use them to drill deep into ice in Greenland and Antarctica, places where even summer seems like winter.

The quarry at these drills includes some of the biggest catches in science.

2014/10/31: The tremendous amounts of lava that are emitted during super-eruptions accumulate over millions of years prior to the event in the Earth's crust. These reservoirs consist of magma that intrudes into the crust in the form of numerous horizontally oriented sheets resting on top of each other like a pile of pancakes.

Putting a price on the services which a particular ecosystem provides may encourage the adoption of greener policies, but it may come at the price of biodiversity conservation. Writing today (30 October) in the journal Science, Professor Bill Adams of the University's Department of Geography argues that assigning a quantitative value to nature does not automatically lead to the conservation of biodiversity, and may in fact contribute to species loss and conflict.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Architecture imitates life, at least when it comes to those spiral ramps in multistory parking garages. Stacked and connecting parallel levels, the ramps are replications of helical structures found in a ubiquitous membrane structure in the cells of the body.

NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of the birth of the Eastern Pacific Ocean's twenty-first tropical depression, located far south of Acapulco, Mexico.

NOAA's GOES-West satellite gathered infrared data on newborn Tropical Depression 21E (TD 21E) and that data was made into an image by NASA/NOAA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At 1200 UTC (9 a.m. EDT), the GOES-West image showed that thunderstorms circled the low-level center and extended northeast of the center indicating that southwesterly wind shear was affecting the storm.