Earth

When it comes to understanding America's coastal fisheries, anecdotes are gripping – stories of a choking algae bloom, or a bay's struggle with commercial development. But when it comes to taking action, there's no beating big data.

In a world warmed by rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, precipitation patterns are going to change because of two factors: one, warmer air can hold more water; and two, changing atmospheric circulation patterns will shift where rain falls. According to previous model research, mid- to high-latitude precipitation is expected to increase by as much as 50%. Yet the reasons why models predict this are hard to tease out.

Members of the brown argus butterfly species that moved north in response to recent climate change have evolved a narrower diet dependent on wild Geranium plants, UK researchers report. However, butterflies that did not move north have more diverse diets, including plants such as Rockrose that are abundant in southern parts of the UK.

Embracing "novel" ecosystems is dangerous, according to a new study by an international team.

Novel ecosystems arise when human activities transform biological communities through species invasions and environmental change. They are seemingly ubiquitous, and thus many policymakers and ecologists argue for them to be accepted as the "new normal"—an idea the researchers say is a bad one.

Researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, have developed a new approach to measure the combined exposure of species to both climate and land use change. This new metric was used to assess the risk to species in the face of combined rates of climate and land use for the US from 2001 to 2051.

For the first time, a research team has been able to reconstruct the solar activity at the end of the last ice age, around 20,000-10,000 years ago, by analysing trace elements in ice cores in Greenland and cave formations from China. During the last glacial maximum, Sweden was covered in a thick ice sheet that stretched all the way down to northern Germany and sea levels were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, because the water was frozen in the extensive ice caps.

MONTREAL, August 15, 2014 — More than 500 delegates to the EcoHealth 2014 conference have issued a call to action to urgently and collaboratively address the impacts of climate change on the health of humans, animals and the global environment in light of the lack of a truly collective response to date.

Local surface uplift can block rivers, particularly in mountainous regions. The impounded water, however, always finds its way downstream, often cutting a narrow gorge into the rocks. Subsequent erosion of the rocks can lead to a complete eradication of this initial incision, until not a trace is left of the original breakthrough. In extreme cases the whole gorge disappears, leaving behind a broad valley with a flat floodplain. Previously, the assumption was that this transition from a narrow gorge to a wide valley was driven by gorge widening and the erosion of the walls of the gorges.

The electronics we use for our computers only knows two different states: zero or one. Quantum systems on the other hand can be in different states at once, they can store a superposition of "zero" and "one". This phenomenon could be used to build ultrafast quantum computers, but there are several technological obstacles that have to be overcome first. The biggest problem is that quantum states are quickly destroyed due to interactions with the environment.

Oxford, August 17, 2014 - A recent study by the British Geological Survey, in association with researchers at the University of Leicester, has delved into the bone and tooth chemistry of King Richard III and uncovered fascinating new details about the life and diet of Britain's last Plantagenet king. The study, published in Elsevier's Journal of Archaeological Science indicates a change in diet and location in his early childhood, and in later life, a diet filled with expensive, high status food and drink.

When beams with trillions of particles go zipping around at near light speed, there's bound to be some chaos. Limiting that chaos in particle colliders is crucial for the groundbreaking results such experiments are designed to deliver.

A new algorithm developed at Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research helps sheds light on how to properly allocate credit.

The research was published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in a paper co-​​authored by Hua-​​Wei Shen, a visiting scholar at Northeastern and associate professor at the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Albert-​​László Barabási, the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern.

Laser physicists have found a way to make atomic-force microscope probes 20 times more sensitive and capable of detecting forces as small as the weight of an individual virus.

The technique, developed by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU), hinges on using laser beams to cool a nanowire probe to minus 265 degrees Celsius.

The ongoing global glacier retreat causes rising sea-levels, changing seasonal water availability and increasing geo-hazards. While melting glaciers have become emblematic of anthropogenic climate change, glacier extent responds very slowly to climate changes. "Typically, it takes glaciers decades or centuries to adjust to climate changes," says climate researcher Ben Marzeion from the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics of the University of Innsbruck. The global retreat of glaciers observed today started around the middle of the 19th century at the end of the Little Ice Age.

A team of researchers led by the University of Chicago has developed a technique to record the quantum mechanical behavior of an individual electron contained within a nanoscale defect in diamond. Their technique uses ultrafast pulses of laser light both to control the defect's entire quantum state and observe how that single electron state changes over time. The work appears in this week's online Science Express and will be published in print later this month in Science.