Earth

Pine forests are especially magical places for atmospheric chemists. Coniferous trees give off pine-scented vapors that form particles, very quickly and seemingly out of nowhere.

New research by German, Finnish and U.S. scientists elucidates the process by which gas wafting from coniferous trees creates particles that can reflect sunlight or promote cloud formation, both important climate feedbacks. The study is published Feb. 27 in Nature.

Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Cologne have created a new model to successfully predict the evolution of the influenza virus from one year to the next. This advance in our understanding of influenza suggests a new, systematic way to select influenza vaccine strains. The findings appear in Nature on Feb. 26.

Enough women experience reproductive coercion – male behavior to control contraception and pregnancy outcomes – that a research team now recommends health care providers address the subjects with their patients and tailor family planning discussions and recommendations accordingly.

Researchers from Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island were part of a team that published "Reproductive coercion and co-occurring intimate partner violence in obstetrics and gynecology patients" in a recent issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have demonstrated that an abrupt weakening of the summer monsoon affected northwest India 4,100 years ago. The resulting drought coincided with the beginning of the decline of the metropolis-building Indus Civilisation, which spanned present-day Pakistan and India, suggesting that climate change could be why many of the major cities of the civilisation were abandoned.

ANN ARBOR—Reducing the size of the Lake Erie "dead zone" to acceptable levels will require cutting nutrient pollution nearly in half in coming decades, at a time when climate change is expected to make such reductions more difficult.

Scientists at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have produced a synthetic air reference standard which can be used to accurately measure levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. This will greatly help scientists contribute to our understanding of climate change.

A paper published in Analytical Chemistry describes how researchers at NPL have created a synthetic gas standard for the first time, which is comparable to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) scale and can be quickly produced in a laboratory and distributed, meeting growing demand.

Temperature, not snowfall, has been driving the fluctuating size of Peru's Quelccaya Ice Cap, whose dramatic shrinkage in recent decades has made it a symbol for global climate change, a Dartmouth-led study shows.

The findings support many scientists' suspicions that tropical glaciers are rapidly shrinking because of a warming climate, and will help scientists to better understand the natural variability of past and modern climate and to refine models that predict tropical glaciers' response to future climate change.

Every second, your computer must process billions of computational steps to produce even the simplest outputs. Imagine if every one of those steps could be made just a tiny bit more efficient. "It would save precious nanoseconds," explained Northeastern University assistant professor of physics Swastik Kar.

Kar and his colleague Yung Joon Jung, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, have developed a series of novel devices that do just that. Their work was published recently in the journal Nature Photonics.

Boulder, Colo., USA – The Geological Society of America's top journal, Geology, displays its multidisciplinary best in this latest posting. Earth science disciplines covered include geoarchaeology, climatology, invertebrate paleontology, sedimentology, geomorphology, seismology, planetary geology, geochemistry, glaciology, plate tectonics, mineralogy, and environmental and medical geology.

WASHINGTON D.C. Feb. 25, 2014 -- A Chinese-U.S. research team is exploring the use of metamaterials -- artificial materials engineered to have exotic properties not found in nature -- to create devices that manipulate sound in versatile and unprecedented ways.

In the journal Applied Physics Letters, the team reports a simple design for a device, called an acoustic field rotator, which can twist wavefronts inside it so that they appear to be propagating from another direction.

Choosing the right physical technique to analyse paintings can make all the difference when it comes to ascertaining their authenticity. Now, a painting initially attributed as belonging to a series called 'Contraste de formes' by French Cubist painter Fernand Léger has definitely been identified as a forgery. This is the first time it has been possible to identify a fake painting by relying on the anomalous behaviour of the concentration of the radioactive form of carbon (14C) in the atmosphere after 1955 to date the canvas.

MILWAUKEE – After having recently discovered a new way to propagate multiple beams of light through a single strand of optical fiber, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) now have found that their novel fiber architecture can transmit images with a quality that is comparable or better than the current commercial endoscopy imaging fibers.

Because of this, the work has potential not only in next-generation high-speed communication, but also biomedical imaging.

Researchers have devised a way of making tiny holes of controllable size in sheets of graphene, a development that could lead to ultrathin filters for improved desalination or water purification.

The team of researchers at MIT, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and in Saudi Arabia succeeded in creating subnanoscale pores in a sheet of the one-atom-thick material, which is one of the strongest materials known. Their findings are published in the journal Nano Letters.

ATLANTA--Protected natural areas in Costa Rica reduced poverty by 16 percent in neighboring communities, mainly by encouraging ecotourism, according to new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although earlier studies indicated that establishing protected areas in poor regions can lead to reductions in poverty, there was no clear understanding why or how it happens.

HONOLULU – Scientists are revealing how microbes living on floating pieces of plastic marine debris affect the ocean ecosystem, and the potential harm they pose to invertebrates, humans and other animals. New research being presented here today delves deeper into the largely unexplored world of the "Plastisphere" – an ecological community of microbial organisms living on ocean plastic that was first discovered last year.