Earth

WASHINGTON D.C. Aug. 12, 2014 -- If you've ever spent any time watching a gecko, you may have wondered about their uncanny ability to adhere to any surface -- including upside down on ceilings. It turns out the little lizards can turn the "stickiness" of toe hairs on the bottom of their feet on and off, which enables them to run at great speeds or even cling to ceilings without expending much energy.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University have developed a model that explains how geckos, as well as spiders and some insects, can run up and down walls, cling to ceilings, and seemingly defy gravity with such effortless grace.

The solution, outlined today in the Journal of Applied Physics, is a remarkable mechanism in the toes of geckos that use tiny, branched hairs called "seta" that can instantly turn their stickiness on and off, and even "unstick" their feet without using any energy.

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and even in the fictional world of CBS' "The Big Bang Theory" look to subatomic particles called neutrinos to answer the big questions about the universe.

Now, a group of scientists led by a physics professor with the College of Science at Virginia Tech are asking whether the neutrino could provide the world with clues about nuclear proliferation in Iran and other political hotspots.

SAN FRANCISCO — A new technique that transforms stinky, air-polluting landfill gas could produce the sweet smell of success as it leads to development of a fuel cell generating clean electricity for homes, offices and hospitals, researchers say. The advance would convert methane gas into hydrogen, an efficient, clean form of energy.

The researcher's report is part of the 248th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

Drier conditions at the edges of forest patches slow down the decay of dead wood and significantly alter the cycling of carbon and nutrients in woodland ecosystems, according to a new study.

Forests around the world have become increasingly fragmented, and in the UK three quarters of woodland area lie within 100 metres of the forest edge. It has long been known that so-called 'edge effects' influence temperature and moisture (the 'microclimate') in woodlands, but the influence on the carbon cycle is largely unknown.

MADISON, Wis. — When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure for its annual report, to show global temperature trends over the last 10,000 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Zhengyu Liu knew that was going to be a problem.

"We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions," says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. "Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming."

MUSKEGON, Mich. -- Climate change is having a direct negative effect on the Great Lakes, including impacts to recreational value, drinking water potential, and becoming more suited to invasive species and infectious pathogens, according to a Grand Valley State University researcher.

Peng says the source locations of the icequakes are difficult to determine because there isn't an extensive seismic network coverage in Antarctica.

"But at least some of the icequakes themselves create surface waves, so they are probably formed very close to the ice surface," he added. "While we cannot be certain, we suspect they simply reflect fracturing of ice in the near surface due to alternating volumetric compressions and expansions as the Rayleigh waves passed through Antarctica's frozen ice."

MADISON, Wis. — A multi-institutional team has resolved a long-unanswered question about how two of the world's most common substances interact.

In a paper published recently in the journal Nature Communications, Manos Mavrikakis, professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his collaborators report fundamental discoveries about how water reacts with metal oxides. The paper opens doors for greater understanding and control of chemical reactions in fields ranging from catalysis to geochemistry and atmospheric chemistry.

The planet's largest and most powerful driver of climate changes from one year to the next, the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, was widely thought to have been weaker in ancient times because of a different configuration of the Earth's orbit. But scientists analyzing 25-foot piles of ancient shells have found that the El Niños 10,000 years ago were as strong and frequent as the ones we experience today.

The air pressure that makes inflatable parade floats, foil balloons and even inflatable buildings easy to deploy and cost effective can be challenging to designers of those same inflatables due to limitations in today's fabrication process, but a new interactive computational tool enables even non-experts to create intricate inflatable structures.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study by a team of Chinese and American conservation biologists quantifies the serious consequences of China's recent economic growth on its coastal ecosystems.

By several measures, 1978 was the beginning of a hugely successful surge in the nation's ability to produce economic value, but that surge brought accelerated degradation in the vitality of its coastal ecosystems.

The dynamic behavior of electrons in magnetic fields is crucial for understanding physical processes, such as the quantum Hall effect, which are important in many areas of solid state physics, including electrical conductivity. Yet, there is much that remains unknown about exactly how electrons behave in a magnetic field.

As the complex story of climate change unfolds, many of the endings are grim. But there are exceptions. Predictions that the lowest-oxygen environments in the ocean would get worse may not come to pass. Instead, University of Washington research shows climate change, as it weakens the trade winds, could shrink the size of these extreme low-oxygen waters.

"The tropics should actually get better oxygenated as the climate warms up," said Curtis Deutsch, a UW associate professor of oceanography. He is lead author of the study published Aug. 8 in Science.

ITHACA, N.Y. – Embracing the pleats, creases and tucks of the Japanese art of decorative paper folding, Cornell University researchers are uncovering how origami principles could lead to exotic materials, soft robots and even tiny transformers.

Publishing online in the journal Science Aug. 8, an interdisciplinary team led by Cornell's Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, and graduate student Jesse Silverberg have discovered how to use a well-known origami folding pattern called the Miura-ori to control fundamental physical properties of any thin sheet of material.