Earth

WASHINGTON D.C. May 20, 2014 -- In a new paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, produced by AIP Publishing, a research team in the United Kingdom and the United States describes how water molecules "caged" in fullerene spheres ("buckyballs") are providing a deeper insight into spin isomers -- varieties of a molecule that differ in their nuclear spin. The results of this work may one day help enhance the analytical and diagnostic power of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

WASHINGTON D.C., May 20, 2014 -- The long life of lithium ion batteries makes them the rechargeable of choice for everything from implantable medical devices to wearable consumer electronics. But lithium ion batteries rely on liquid chemistries involving lithium salts dissolved in organic solvents, creating flame risks that would be avoided if the cells were completely solid-state.

Website privacy policies are almost obligatory for many online services, but for anyone who reads these often unwieldy documents, trust in the provider is more commonly reduced than gained, according to US researchers.

In theory, the laws of physics are absolute. However, when it comes to the laws of thermodynamics—the science that studies how heat and temperature relate to energy—there are times where they no longer seem to apply. In a paper recently published in EPJ B, Robert Adamietz from the University of Augsburg, Germany, and colleagues have demonstrated that a theoretical model of the environment's influence on a particle does not violate the third law of thermodynamics, despite appearances to the contrary.

Computer simulations play an increasingly important role in the description and development of new materials. Yet, despite major advances in computer technology, the simulations in statistical physics are typically restricted to systems of up to a few 100,000 particles, which is many times smaller than the actual material quantities used in typical experiments. Researchers therefore use so-called finite-size corrections in order to adjust the results obtained for comparatively small simulation systems to the macroscopic scale.

Aerothermoelasticity has become a hot research area for several years around the world. Professor YANG Chao and his group from Beihang University set out to tackle this problem. Their work, entitled "A high-efficiency aerothermoelastic analysis method", was published in Sci China-Phys Mech Astron, 2014, 57(6): 1111-1118.

SAN FRANCISCO – A cluster of closely timed earthquakes over 100 years in the 17th and 18th centuries released as much accumulated stress on San Francisco Bay Area's major faults as the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, suggesting two possible scenarios for the next "Big One" for the region, according to new research published by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).

MISSOULA – A new paper co-written by four University of Montana researchers finds that humans have more than doubled tropical nitrogen inputs.

Benjamin Sullivan, a researcher working with UM College of Forestry and Conservation Professor Cory Cleveland, led the team that looked at the nitrogen cycle in tropical rain forests. Sullivan and his colleagues used a new method to demonstrate that biological nitrogen fixation in tropical rain forests may be less than a quarter of previous estimates.

Rising temperatures and ash from Northern Hemisphere forest fires combined to cause large-scale surface melting of the Greenland ice sheet in 1889 and 2012, contradicting conventional thinking that the melt events were driven by warming alone, a Dartmouth College-led study finds.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Photocatalysis—catalysis assisted by light—is a promising route to convert solar energy into chemical fuels. Particularly appealing is the possibility to use photocatalysis to split water molecules into molecular hydrogen. Although photocatalysis has been around for many years, the search for viable photocatalysts to facilitate the splitting of water molecules continues to date.

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation is known to influence global surface temperatures, with El Niño conditions leading to warmer temperatures and La Niña conditions leading to colder temperatures. However, a new study in Geophysical Research Letters shows that some types of El Niño do not have this effect, a finding that could explain recent decade-scale slowdowns in global warming.

Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago.

In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial's Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934.

New research has shown for the first time that the amount of water flowing through rivers in snow-affected regions depends significantly on how much of the precipitation falls as snowfall. This means in a warming climate, if less of the precipitation falls as snow, rivers will discharge less water than they currently do.

Birth weight, hours slept, eyeglasses, city birds, washing machines, teenage schoolgirls and other quantifiable signals of well-being can help measure the wealth of a nation beyond Gross Domestic Product, experts say.

Moving beyond GDP to sustainability — the focus of a UN­-backed high-level symposium May 19 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — requires broad indicators of a nation's social and environmental well-being to complement measures of economic production and income.

As smartphones get smarter and computers compute faster, researchers actively search for ways to speed up the processing of information. Now, scientists at Princeton University have made a step forward in developing a new class of materials that could be used in future technologies.

They have discovered a new quantum effect that enables electrons — the negative-charge-carrying particles that make today's electronic devices possible — to dash through the interior of these materials with very little resistance.