Earth

As the world turns its attention to Brazil with the opening of the World Cup this month, many people around the globe know the country's soccer fame, but few realize that it is the world's leader in reducing carbon emissions. A new study published in Science magazine provides the first in-depth analysis of how Brazil reached this global-leader status and managed to increase its agriculture production at the same time.

This news release is available in French.

As far back as the time of the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, forests recovered from fires in the same manner they do today, according to a team of researchers from McGill University and the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.

RIVERSIDE, Calif.—Scientists know that wildland fire emissions play a significant role in the global carbon cycle and that its principal component – carbon dioxide – is a primary driver of climate change. But predicting and quantifying the effects of potential future emissions is a difficult process requiring the integration of complex interactions of climate, fire, and vegetation.

The June feature of Science Elements, the American Chemical Society's (ACS') weekly podcast series, shines the spotlight on devices that use chemistry to locate people trapped in collapsed buildings. The episode is available at http://www.acs.org/scienceelements.

Fish and aquatic life living in the high seas are more valuable as a carbon sink than as food and should be better protected, according to research from the University of British Columbia.

The study found fish and aquatic life remove 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, a service valued at about $148 billion US. This dwarfs the $16 billion US paid for 10 million tonnes of fish caught on the high seas annually.

Cleveland . . . A geologist studied fossils to confirm that stones used in 19th century Ohio grain mills originated from France. Fossils embedded in these millstones were analyzed to determine that stones known as French buhr were imported from regions near Paris, France, to Ohio in the United States.

Dr. Joseph Hannibal, curator of invertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was lead author on research published in the Society for Sedimentary Geology journal PALAIOS.

Neutrinos are tiny, neutral elementary particles that, contrary to the standard model of physics, have been proven to have mass. One possible explanation for this mass could be that neutrinos are their own antiparticles, so-called Majorana particles.

Though experimental evidence for this is still lacking, many theoretical extensions of the standard model of physics predict the Majorana nature of neutrinos. If this hypothesis proves to be true, many previously unanswered questions about the origin of our universe and the origin of matter could be answered.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Gamma and neutron imaging offer possible improvements over existing techniques such as X-ray or CT, but their safety is not yet fully understood. Using computer simulations, imaging the liver and breast with gamma or neutron radiation was found to be safe, delivering levels of radiation on par with conventional medical imaging, according to researchers at Duke Medicine.

The findings, published in the June issue of the journal Medical Physics, will help researchers to move testing of gamma and neutron imaging into animals and later humans.

One of the world's longest-running ecological studies has revealed that Amazonian forests are being altered by multiple environmental threats – creating even greater perils for the world's largest rainforest.

"It's like a boxer getting hit by a flurry of punches," says lead author William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

For the past 35 years, a team of Brazilian and international researchers has studied how diverse communities of trees and vines respond when the Amazonian rainforest is fragmented by cattle ranching.

Quantum criticality, the strange electronic state that may be intimately related to high-temperature superconductivity, is notoriously difficult to study. But a new discovery of "quantum critical points" could allow physicists to develop a classification scheme for quantum criticality -- the first step toward a broader explanation.

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This news release is available in German.

The amount of "hedging" language—words that suggest room for doubt—used by prominent newspapers in articles about climate change has increased over time, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The study, published in the journal Environmental Communication, also found that newspapers in the U.S. use more hedging language in climate stories than their counterparts in Spain.

PULLMAN, Wash.—Researchers at Washington State University have used a super-cold cloud of atoms that behaves like a single atom to see a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago and witnessed only once since.

The phenomenon takes place in the seemingly otherworldly realm of quantum physics and opens a new experimental path to potentially powerful quantum computing.