Earth

Climate change may be bad news for billions, but scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered one unlikely winner – a tiny British bird, the long-tailed tit.

Like other small animals that live for only two or three years, these birds had until now been thought to die in large numbers during cold winters. But new research suggests that warm weather during spring instead holds the key to their survival.

COLUMBUS, Ohio—For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that information can flow through a diamond wire.

In the experiment, electrons did not flow through diamond as they do in traditional electronics; rather, they stayed in place and passed along a magnetic effect called "spin" to each other down the wire—like a row of sports spectators doing "the wave."

Potsdam: Rift valleys are large depressions formed by tectonic stretching forces. Volcanoes often occur in rift valleys, within the rift itself or on the rift flanks as e.g. in East Africa. The magma responsible for this volcanism is formed in the upper mantle and ponds at the boundary between crust and mantle. For many years, the question of why volcanoes develop outside the rift zone in an apparently unexpected location offset by tens of kilometers from the source of molten magma directly beneath the rift has remained unanswered.

Warmer summers brought on by climate change will cause more deaths in London and southeast England than the rest of the country, scientists predict.

Researchers at Imperial College London looked at temperature records and mortality figures for 2001 to 2010 to find out which districts in England and Wales experience the biggest effects from warm temperatures.

The climate is warming in the arctic at twice the rate of the rest of the globe creating a longer growing season and increased plant growth, which captures atmospheric carbon, and thawing permafrost, which releases carbon into the atmosphere. Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) Assistant Scientist Sue Natali and colleagues engineered first-of-a-kind warming experiments in the field to determine net gains or losses in carbon emissions.

Connecting extreme weather to climate change distracts from the need to protect society from high-impact weather events which will continue to happen irrespective of human-induced climate change, say experts.

Writing in the journal Weather, Climate and Society, the University of Manchester researchers argue that cutting greenhouse gas emissions, while crucial to reducing humanity's longer-term impact on the planet, will not eliminate violent storms, tornadoes or flooding and the damage they cause.

Research into a recently discovered class of materials shows they have the necessary characteristics to develop ultra-energy efficient electronics. Topological insulators (TI) are three-dimensional materials that conduct electricity on their surfaces, while the interior insulates.

Their surfaces are particularly unique because the motion of the electrons is "protected" by symmetry, meaning electrons will keep moving without scattering even when they encounter defects and contamination.

Far beneath the surface of the ocean, deep currents act as conveyer belts, channeling heat, oxygen, carbon and nutrients around the globe.

A new study by the University of Pennsylvania's Irina Marinov and Raffaele Bernardello and colleagues from McGill University has found that recent climate change may be acting to slow down one of these conveyer belts, with potentially serious consequences for the future of the planet's climate.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering are developing ground-improvement methods to help increase the resilience of homes and low-rise structures built on top of soils prone to liquefaction during strong earthquakes.

Researchers from Lund University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History have made a unique discovery in a well-preserved fern that lived 180 million years ago. Both undestroyed cell nuclei and individual chromosomes have been found in the plant fossil, thanks to its sudden burial in a volcanic eruption.

The experimental and numerical study of the behaviour of polymers in concentrated solutions is a line of research that is still highly active. In the past, it enabled us to understand why materials like rubber have certain elastic properties. A distinctive feature of these systems is that the long "chained" molecules composing them tend to penetrate each other and interweave at their ends forming very durable bonds that make them always return to their initial conformation whenever they are "stretched".

Researchers from Princeton University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have confirmed that during the last ice age iron fertilization caused plankton to thrive in a region of the Southern Ocean.

The study published in Science confirms a longstanding hypothesis that wind-borne dust carried iron to the region of the globe north of Antarctica, driving plankton growth and eventually leading to the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Chronologies of glacial advances during the last glacial period are not contemporaneous throughout the Tibetan Plateau. Professor YI Chaolu and his research group from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, dated glacial boulders on moraines from the last glacial period in the Nyainqentanglha Mountains, Tibet. They suggested that glacial advances that occurred during a relatively warm period (MIS 3) between two cold stages of the last glacial episode in the Nyainqentanglha may correlate with millennial-scale climate change (Heinrich) events.

Nobody has seen them yet; particles that are smaller than the Higgs particle. However theories predict their existence, and now the most important of these theories have been critically tested. The result: The existence of the yet unseen particles is now more likely than ever.

"I gave them a very critical review", says Thomas Ryttov, particle physicist and associate professor at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP ³ - Origins), University of Southern Denmark.

EUGENE, Ore. -- (March 20, 2014) -- University of Oregon physicists using a supercomputer and mathematically rich formulas have captured fundamental insights about what happens when objects moving freely jam to a standstill.