Earth

In a world facing the challenges of climate change, demographic boom and deficit in food resources, the word "sustainable" and the concept behind it become increasingly relevant. Sustainability in the way humanity uses available resources is key to a brighter and greener future.

Planting cover crops in rotation between cash crops -- widely agreed to be ecologically beneficial -- is even more valuable than previously thought, according to a team of agronomists, entomologists, agroecologists, horticulturists and biogeochemists from Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

This news release is available in German.

Researchers from the University of Melbourne and University of Sydney are confident their new reaserach results will make significant differences to the calculations of surface tension of water used by the next generation of atmospheric scientists, biophysicists and engineers of technology like inkjet printers.

These latest investigations have clinched a long-standing controversy amongst the physical Chemistry community; the air-water interface is negatively charged by the adsorption of hydroxide ions.

Football fascinates millions of fans, almost all of them unaware that the game is subject to the laws of physics. Despite their seemingly arbitrary decisions, players obey certain rules, as they constantly adjust their positions in relation to their teammates, opponents, the ball and the goal. A team of Japanese scientists has now analysed the time-dependent fluctuation of both the ball and all players' positions throughout an entire match. They discovered that a simple rule governs the complex dynamics of the ball and the team's front-line.

Boulder, Colo., USA – Geology papers published 17 Mar. 2014 cover (1) modeling of seabed turbidity currents; (2) a large earthquake at Lake Vättern, Switzerland, about 11,500 years ago; (3) genesis of high-grade gold at the Porgera gold deposit, Papua New Guinea; (4) discovery of the Ediacaran guide fossil Cloudina sp. and the depositional age of the Bambuí Group; (5) earthquakes along the fossil Moho in Alpine Corsica; and (6) using LiDAR to better understand New Zealand's Alpine Fault.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The world's oceans cover more than 72 percent of the earth's surface, impact a major part of the carbon cycle, and contribute to variability in global climate and weather patterns. However, accurately predicting the condition of the ocean is limited by current methods. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have applied complex statistical models to increase the accuracy of ocean forecasting that can influence the ways in which forecasters predict long-range events such as El Nińo and the lower levels of the ocean food chain—one of the world's largest ecosystems.

DALLAS, March 19, 2014 — The health benefits of eating dark chocolate have been extolled for centuries, but the exact reason has remained a mystery –– until now. Researchers reported here today that certain bacteria in the stomach gobble the chocolate and ferment it into anti-inflammatory compounds that are good for the heart.

GPS technology has broadly advanced science and society's ability to pinpoint precise information, from driving directions to tracking ground motions during earthquakes. A new technique led by a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego stands to improve weather models and hurricane forecasting by detecting precise conditions in the atmosphere through a new GPS system aboard airplanes.

The green of St. Patrick's Day in the Mid-Atlantic was covered by white snow as a result of a late winter snow storm. The covering of the green was captured in a movie made at NASA using NOAA's GOES satellite data.

The winter storm dropped snow totals from 6" to 12" of snow from Baltimore, Md. to Richmond, Va. The storm arrived during the evening of March 16 and continued through March 17. As of 1 p.m. EDT, light bands of snow continued to fall throughout the Washington, D.C. area.

A team of University of Toronto physicists led by Alex Hayat has proposed a novel and efficient way to leverage the strange quantum physics phenomenon known as entanglement. The approach would involve combining light-emitting diodes (LEDs) with a superconductor to generate entangled photons and could open up a rich spectrum of new physics as well as devices for quantum technologies, including quantum computers and quantum communication.

Carbon nanotubes are becoming increasingly attractive for photovoltaic solar cells as a replacement to silicon. Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden have discovered that controlled placement of the carbon nanotubes into nano-structures produces a huge boost in electronic performance. Their groundbreaking results are published in the prestigious journal Advanced Materials.

A team of observational cosmologists may have found evidence that cosmic inflation occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, a point predicted 18 years ago by Johns Hopkins University cosmologist and theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke engineers have devised a way to improve the efficiency of lithotripsy -- the demolition of kidney stones using focused shock waves. After decades of research, all it took was cutting a groove near the perimeter of the shock wave-focusing lens and changing its curvature.

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