Earth

If a scientist has a good reputation among his colleagues, other scientists are more likely to cite his publications. According to a study, reputation is crucial for the impact of publications.

Author reputation is key in driving a paper's citation count early in its life cycle, before a tipping point, after which reputation has much less influence compared to the paper's citation count, says Aalto University Professor Santo Fortunato, pointing out that this is a key finding of the study.

Quality – not quantity – of publications build authors' reputation

To explore any possible limits of the two theories, they have been experimentally verified many times already and both have passed all the tests so far. Hence, scientists look for deviations in experiments with increasing precision or under extreme conditions.

For this purpose, Nörtershäuser's team has now accelerated ions to velocities near the speed of light and illuminated them with a laser.

The XMASS collaboration, led by Yoichiro Suzuki at the Kavli IPMU, has reported its latest results on the search for warm dark matter. Their results rule out the possibility that super-weakly interacting massive bosonic particles (bosonic super-WIMPs) constitute all dark matter in the universe. This result was published in the September 19th issue of the Physical Review Letters as an Editors' Suggestion.

This news release is available in German.

Imagine being able to tune the properties of a solid material just by flashing pulses of light on it, for example turning an insulator into a superconductor. That is just one potential payoff down-the-road from the physical phenomenon of electrons and atoms interacting with ultrashort pulses of light. The technology of ultrafast spectroscopy is a key to understanding this phenomenon and now a new wrinkle to that technology has been introduced by Berkeley Lab researchers.

A specialist group of European researchers are studying the remains of prehistoric human settlements which are now submerged beneath our coastal seas. Some of these drowned sites are tens of thousands of years old. From the progressive discovery and analysis of these prehistoric remains, a new scientific field has emerged, combining the expertise from many disciplines including archaeology, oceanography and the geosciences. The new field is called Continental Shelf Prehistoric Research.

The next generation of aircraft could be thinner and lighter thanks to the development of a new imaging technique that could detect damage previously invisible to acoustic imaging systems.

The nonlinear acoustic technique developed by researchers from the University of Bristol's Ultrasonics and Non-destructive Testing (NDT) research group is published in the current issue of Physical Review Letters together with an accompanying article in Physics.

New theoretical physics models could help us better grasp the atmospheric chemistry of ozone depletion. Indeed, understanding photoabsorption of nitrous oxide (N2O) — a process which involves the transfer of the energy of a photon to the molecule — matters because a small fraction of N2O reacts with oxygen atoms in the stratosphere to produce among others nitric oxide (NO). The latter participates in the catalytic destruction of ozone (O3). Now, new theoretical work unveils the actual dynamic of the photoabsorption of nitrous oxide molecules.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6, 2014 — It's happened to many of us: Half asleep in the morning, you finish brushing your teeth and reach for your daily glass of orange juice. After taking a big swig, you spit it back out, making a face like you've just chewed on a lemon. Turns out, a specific chemical in your toothpaste is responsible for that nasty taste. This week, Reactions explains why toothpaste and orange juice don't mix. Learn all about it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X5_gtel-c0.

A new crystallographic technique developed at the University of Leeds is set to transform scientists' ability to observe how molecules work.

A research paper, published in the journal Nature Methods on October 5, describes a new way of doing time-resolved crystallography, a method that researchers use to observe changes within the structure of molecules.

A study published in Nature Geoscience shows that air pollution has had a significant impact on the amount of water flowing through many rivers in the northern hemisphere.

The paper shows how such pollution, known as aerosols, can have an impact on the natural environment and highlights the importance of considering these factors in assessments of future climate change.

AUSTIN, Texas—A team led by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics has for the first time directly observed multiple parts of Greenland's subglacial plumbing system and how that system evolves each summer to slow down the ice sheet's movement toward the sea.

These new observations could be important in accurately modeling Greenland's future response to climate change.

Tropical Storm Simon is following the path of several other tropical storms that formed in the Eastern Pacific Ocean by crawling northward along the western coastline of Mexico. NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an infrared image of Simon on Oct. 3 that showed the eastern side of the storm over Mexico.

NHC has not posted watches or warnings on Simon, but the tropical storm is large and close enough to shore to generate some heavy rainfall totals and rough surf.

Simon is expected to produce rainfall amounts of 3 to 5 inches with isolated amounts around 8 inches through Friday, Oct. 3 across Western Guerrero and Michoacan, Colima, western Jalisco and Nayarit in western Mexico. These rains could cause flash flooding and mud slides.

About one-fifth of the Earth's atmosphere is oxygen, pumped out by green plants as a result of photosynthesis and used by most living things on the planet to keep our metabolisms running. But before the first photosynthesizing organisms appeared about 2.4 billion years ago, the atmosphere likely contained mostly carbon dioxide, as is the case today on Mars and Venus.