Earth

LA JOLLA, CA—August 14, 2014—Chemists led by Nobel laureate K. Barry Sharpless at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have used his click chemistry to uncover unprecedented, powerful reactivity for making new drugs, diagnostics, plastics, smart materials and many other products.

Alexandria, Va. — Tokyo, a city of more than 13 million people, has been devastated by earthquakes in the past and likely will be again. But when? And what role do ongoing slow-slip earthquakes — the kind that generally can't be felt at the surface — play in relieving or building up stress?

Alexandria, Va. — The La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles are a famous predator trap. For every herbivore, a dozen or more carnivores — saber-toothed cats and dire wolves chief among them — are pulled from the prolific Pleistocene fossil site. In fact, the remains of more than 4,000 dire wolves have been excavated, along with more than 2,000 saber-toothed cats. The sheer number of fossils allows researchers to ask population-level questions about the climate and environment as well as how these animals evolved.

Near real-time analysis of the April 1 earthquake in Iquique, Chile, showed that the 8.2 event occurred in a gap on the fault unruptured since 1877 and that the April event was not what the scientists had expected, according to an international team of geologists.

"We assumed that the area of the 1877 earthquake would eventually rupture, but all indications are that this 8.2 event was not the 8.8 event we were looking for," said Kevin P. Furlong, professor of geophysics, Penn State. "We looked at it to see if this was the big one."

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The results reproduce Antarctica's recent contribution to sea level rise as observed by satellites in the last two decades and show that the ice continent could become the largest contributor to sea level rise much sooner than previously thought.

BOULDER – Researchers at NCAR and partner organizations are making significant headway in predicting the behavior of the atmosphere on a variety of fronts, including:

A long lasting foreshock series controlled the rupture process of this year's great earthquake near Iquique in northern Chile. The earthquake was heralded by a three quarter year long foreshock series of ever increasing magnitudes culminating in a Mw 6.7 event two weeks before the mainshock. The mainshock (magnitude 8.1) finally broke on April 1st a central piece out of the most important seismic gap along the South American subduction zone.

Porphyrin molecules are essential to many biological processes, such as photosynthesis and respiration. Dr. Wilhelm Auwärter's group is investigating these all-round talents at TU München.

Normally, hydrogen attaches to the outer edges of the porphyrin core – named porphine, but other chemical entities can take the place of hydrogen, thereby changing the properties of the molecules.

Materials scientists have long sought to form glass from pure, monoatomic metals. Scott X. Mao and colleagues did it.

Their paper, "Formation of Monoatomic Metallic Glasses Through Ultrafast Liquid Quenching," was recently published online in Nature, a leading science journal.

This Week From AGU: Supperrotation on Venus and Titan, exploratory modeling

All life on Earth came from one common ancestor – a single-celled organism – but what it looked like, how it lived and how it evolved into today's modern cells is a four billion year old mystery being solved by researchers at UCL using mathematical modelling.

Findings published today in PLOS Biology suggest for the first time that life's Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) had a 'leaky' membrane, which helps scientists answer two of biology's biggest questions:

1. Why all cells use the same bizarre, complex mechanism to harvest energy

While hiking through the Ozarks' characteristic oak and hickory forests as a teenager, ecologist Scott Woolbright discovered something decidedly uncharacteristic for the region: prickly pear cacti growing on an exposed, rocky ledge.

In a recent paper published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Woolbright describes how populations and communities like these, known as climate relicts, can help scientists understand how ecological communities are affected by climate change.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A catalyst made from a foamy form of copper has vastly different electrochemical properties from catalysts made with smooth copper in reactions involving carbon dioxide, a new study shows. The research, by scientists in Brown University's Center for the Capture and Conversion of CO2, suggests that copper foams could provide a new way of converting excess CO2 into useful industrial chemicals.

The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis.