Earth

Using a cutting-edge research technique, UCLA researchers have reconstructed the temperature history of a region that plays a major role in determining climate around the world.

The findings, published online Feb. 27 in the journal Nature Geoscience, will help inform scientists about the processes influencing global warming in the western tropical Pacific Ocean.

Three days of satellite imagery from NOAA's GOES-East satellite were compiled into an animation that showed the progression of the storm system that drastically changed temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern U.S. from spring-like warmth to the bitter cold of winter.

A powerful weather system moved from the central U.S. to the east coast from March 11 to March 13 making the shocking temperature change. Over the course of three days, Washington, D.C.'s daytime temperatures plummeted by over 40 degrees and brought wind chills in the teens on March 13.

Oxygen-16, one of the key elements of life on earth, is produced by a series of reactions inside of red giant stars. Now a team of physicists, including one from North Carolina State University, has revealed how the element's nuclear shape changes depending on its state, even though other attributes such as spin and parity don't appear to differ. Their findings may shed light on how oxygen is produced.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Researchers have discovered that creating a graphene-copper-graphene "sandwich" strongly enhances the heat conducting properties of copper, a discovery that could further help in the downscaling of electronics.

Populations of endangered salmonids are supported by releasing large quantities of hatchery-reared fish, but the fisheries' catches have continued to decrease. Earlier research has shown that certain behavioural traits explain individual differences in how fish survive in the wild. A new Finnish study conducted on brown trout now shows that there are predictable individual differences in behavioural traits, like activity, tendency to explore new surroundings and stress tolerance. Furthermore, certain individual differences were observed to contain heritable components.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that tropical grassy areas, which play a critical role in the world's ecology, are under threat as a result of ineffective management.

According to research, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, they are often misclassified and this leads to degradation of the land which has a detrimental effect on the plants and animals that are indigenous to these areas.

Chemical reactions taking place in outer space can now be more easily studied on Earth. An international team of researchers from the University of Aarhus in Denmark and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, discovered an efficient and versatile way of braking the rotation of molecular ions. The spinning speed of these ions is related to a rotational temperature. Using an extremely tenuous, cooled gas, the researchers have lowered this temperature to about -265 °C.

When scientists observe minute particles like nanoparticles or bacteria in fluid under a microscope, they don't see a motionless image. What they do see are particles making the tiniest irregular twitches not unlike the nervous ups-and-downs of market prices and exchange rates. These two forms of random twitching – microparticles in fluid and price developments on the financial market – are not just similar at first sight as a Japanese-Swiss team has now demonstrated. The underlying mechanism is the same too.

Researchers have developed a new approach to simulating the energetic processes that may have led to the emergence of cell metabolism on Earth – a crucial biological function for all living organisms.

The research, which is published online today in the journal Astrobiology, could help scientists to understand whether it is possible for life to have emerged in similar environments on other worlds.

The Ross Sea, a major, biologically productive Antarctic ecosystem, "clearly will be extensively modified by future climate change" in the coming decades as rising temperatures and changing wind patterns create longer periods of ice-free open water, affecting the life cycles of both predators and prey, according to a paper published by researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

To make their predictions, the researchers used information drawn from the Regional Ocean Modeling System, a computer model of sea-ice, ocean, atmosphere and ice-shelf interactions.

Tropical Cyclone Gillian made landfall on the western Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia, weakened and has now meandered back over water. On March 12, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of the remnants in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have created a new type of "ultracold" molecule, using lasers to cool atoms nearly to absolute zero and then gluing them together, a technology that might be applied to quantum computing, precise sensors and advanced simulations.

"It sounds counterintuitive, but you can use lasers to take away the kinetic energy, resulting in radical cooling," said Yong P. Chen, an associate professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.

SALT LAKE CITY, March 12, 2014 – University of Utah chemists discovered how vibrations in chemical bonds can be used to predict chemical reactions and thus design better catalysts to speed reactions that make medicines, industrial products and new materials.

"The vibrations alone are not adequate, but combined with other classical techniques in physical organic chemistry, we are able to predict how reactions can occur," says chemistry professor Matt Sigman, senior author of the study in the Thursday, March 13, issue of the journal Nature.

LA JOLLA, CA—March 12, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a method for modifying organic molecules that significantly expands the possibilities for developing new pharmaceuticals and improving old ones.

"This is a technology that can be applied directly to many medicinally relevant compounds," said Jin-Quan Yu, a professor in TSRI's Department of Chemistry and the senior author of the new report, which appears in Nature March 13, 2014.

The team of Francesca Ferlaino, Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, has experimentally shown chaotic behavior of particles in a quantum gas. "For the first time we have been able to observe quantum chaos in the scattering behavior of ultracold atoms," says an excited Ferlaino. The physicists used random matrix theory to confirm their results, thus asserting the universal character of this statistical theory. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner formulated random matrix theory to describe complex systems in the 1950s.