Earth

A new discovery in the study of how lava dome volcanoes erupt may help in the development of methods to predict how a volcanic eruption will behave, say scientists at the University of Liverpool.

Volcanologists at the University have discovered that a process called frictional melting plays a role in determining how a volcano will erupt, by dictating how fast magma can ascend to the surface, and how much resistance it faces en-route.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — New research by a team of Florida State University scientists shows the first detailed look at global land surface warming trends over the last 100 years, illustrating precisely when and where different areas of the world started to warm up or cool down.

The research indicates that the world is indeed getting warmer, but historical records show that it hasn't happened everywhere at the same rate.

And that new information even took scientists by surprise.

The Early–Middle Cambrian (Stage 4-5) boundary which is approx. 510 million years old, marks the very first severe extinction of the Phanerozoic and an extended marine anoxia period.

In this study, F. Jourdan and colleagues use a combination of 40Ar/39Ar and U-Pb dating techniques to demonstrate that the Kalkarindji large igneous province (about two million square kilometers), Australia, was emplaced over a relatively short period of time 510-511 million years ago.

Researchers from the University of Wyoming, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of Montana have directly sampled water from underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The waters were collected from boreholes drilled through as much as half a mile of ice to reach the ice sheet's bed. By examining the chemistry of the water, the researchers found that the rock underneath the ice is actively reacting with the Earth's atmosphere.

The periodic table of the elements is to get crowded towards its heaviest members. Evidence for the artificial creation of element 117 has recently been obtained at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, an accelerator laboratory located in Darm-stadt, Germany. The experiment was performed by an international team of chemists and physicists headed by Prof. Christoph Düllmann, who holds positions at GSI, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM).

Twenty years ago, Philip Platzman and Allen Mills, Jr. at Bell Laboratories proposed that a gamma-ray laser could be made from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of positronium, the simplest atom made of both matter and antimatter (1). That was a year before a BEC of any kind of atom was available in any laboratory. Today, BECs have been made of 13 different elements, four of which are available in laboratories of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) (2), and JQI theorists have turned their attention to prospects for a positronium gamma-ray laser.

Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University have made several important discoveries regarding the basic structure of mesons—subatomic particles long thought to be composed of one quark and one antiquark and bound together by a strong interaction.

The drive to develop ultrasmall and ultrafast electronic devices using a single atomic layer of semiconductors, such as transition metal dichalcogenides, has received a significant boost. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have recorded the first observations of a strong nonlinear optical resonance along the edges of a single layer of molybdenum disulfide.

Natural gas (methane) can be converted into hydrogen (H2), which is used in clean energy, synthetic fertilizers, and many other chemicals. The reaction requires water and a nickel catalyst. Methane and water molecules attach on the catalyst's surface, where they dissociate into their atomic components. These then recombine to form different compounds like H2 and CO. Previous research has focused mainly on understanding how methane dissociates, but experimental constraints have limited research into water dissociation.

Shrinking ice sheets and melting ice caps are well known consequences of climate change. But a new study reveals that impacts on biodiversity will be just as severe in other regions of the world. When multiple dimensions of climate change are analyzed, different regions emerge as threatened by different aspects of climate change. The tropics, for example, will be highly affected by local changes in temperature and precipitation, leading to novel climates with no current analogues in the planet.

Corn yields in the central United States have become more sensitive to drought conditions in the past two decades, according to Stanford research.

WASHINGTON - The Bureau of Reclamation is releasing a series of videos summarizing collaborative research addressing climate change and variability impacts, estimating flood and drought hazards, and improving streamflow prediction. This information was presented in January at the Second Annual Progress Meeting on Reclamation Climate and Hydrology Research.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. – Oil and gas development activities, including underground disposal of wastewater and hydraulic fracturing, may induce earthquakes by changing the state of stress on existing faults to the point of failure. Earthquakes from wastewater disposal may be triggered at tens of kilometers from the wellbore, which is a greater range than previously thought, according to research to be presented today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America (SSA).

By hightailing it to nearby ponds and shallow waterways, frogs and salamanders have – until now – had a way to evade exotic trout introduced to the West's high-mountain lakes for recreational fishing.

SAN DIEGO, CA – April 30, 2014 – Three new mango-related studies were presented this week at the 2014 Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) in San Diego, revealing initial findings on the effects of mango consumption on ulcerative colitis and bone parameters in animal models.