Earth

Irvine, Calif., June 30, 2016 -- For the valerian plant, higher elevations in the Colorado Rocky Mountains are becoming much more co-ed. And the primary reason appears to be climate change.

Climate change is already affecting inland fish across North America -- including some fish that are popular with anglers. Scientists are seeing a variety of changes in how inland fish reproduce, grow and where they can live, according to four new studies published today in a special issue of Fisheries magazine.

Fish that have the most documented risk include those living in arid environments and coldwater species such as sockeye salmon, lake trout, walleye, and prey fish that larger species depend on for food.

Climate change in Antarctica, cooling in some places and warming in others, is causing a dramatic shift in the population of Adélie penguins, according to a paper published online June 29 in Scientific Reports.

The earthquake distribution on ultraslow mid-ocean ridges differs fundamentally from other spreading zones. Water circulating at a depth of up to 15 kilometres leads to the formation of rock that resembles soft soap. This is how the continental plates on ultraslow mid-ocean ridges may move without jerking, while the same process in other regions leads to many minor earthquakes, according to geophysicists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI).

For the first time, scientists have been successful in measuring the processes by which an entire forest "breathes," using sophisticated technology involving flux towers and new instrumentation that can precisely measure two different types (isotopes) of carbon dioxide in the air. A team led by Richard Wehr and Scott Saleska at the University of Arizona obtained detailed long-term measurements of the respiration and photosynthesis rates of a temperate deciduous forest during the day and the night.

Pledges made for the Paris agreement on climate change last winter would lead to global temperature rise of 2.6 to 3.1°C by the end of the century, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. In fact, the entire carbon budget for limiting warming to below 2°C might have been emitted by 2030, according to the study.

When rain falls on a lotus leaf, the leaf doesn't get wet. Thanks to its special structure, the water drops roll off without wetting the surface. Artificial materials can be made water-repellent, too. It is, however, extremely challenging to produce a surface with switchable wetting. Now, a research team from TU Wien, KU Leuven and University of Zürich has managed to manipulate a surface of a single layer of boron nitride in such a way that it can be switched back and forth between states with high and low wetting and adhesion.

Hexagons making waves

Topological insulators behave like insulators at their core and allow good conductivity on their surface. They owe their characteristics to a new quantum state within the material discovered in 2007 and 2009 for 2D and 3D materials, respectively. Scientists studying the surface of ring-shaped, or toric, topological insulators, have just discovered some characteristics that had only previously been confirmed in spheres. Jakson Fonseca from the University Federal of Viçosa, Brazil, and colleagues describe their findings in a paper published in EPJ B.

Without detailed knowledge of the properties of the materials we use today's technology could neither function nor develop. A new description of electron scattering in the surface layers of samples proposed by the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw significantly speeds up materials analysis and enables a better understanding of what can really be seen in a sample.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 29, 2016 -- A multinational team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory Climate Change Science Institute has found the first positive correlation between human activity and enhanced vegetation growth.

Boulder, Colorado - The July 2016 issue of the Geological Society of America's flagship journal, Geology, includes two open-access features: "Pre-Mississippian tectonic affinity across the Canada Basin-Arctic margins of Alaska and Canada," by David W. Houseknecht and Christopher D. Connors; and "Hydrothermal alteration of seafloor peridotites does not influence oxygen fugacity recorded by spinel oxybarometry," by Suzanne K. Birner and colleagues.

Thirty young scientists had a unique opportunity yesterday to present their research work to an audience of participants at the 66th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. It was the first time that a poster session was held at the meeting. One hundred eighty of the 400 young participants from 80 countries had applied to partake. The topics covered precision measurements, quantum physics, astronomy, biophysics, high-energy physics and materials science.

A group of physicists from the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Lomonosov Moscow State University, has learned to use personal computer for calculations of complex equations of quantum mechanics, usually solved with help of supercomputers. This PC does the job much faster. An article about the results of the work has been published in the journal Computer Physics Communications.

The smallest building blocks of matter were the focus of a panel discussion held yesterday at the 66th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

In particular, laureates Steven Chu, David J. Gross, Takaaki Kajita and Carlo Rubia together with three young scientists working at the European nuclear research centre CERN in Geneva spoke about recent experiments designed to detect hitherto unknown particles. The Director General of CERN, Fabiola Gianotti, was also present via live video stream.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 28, 2016--A team of researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Curtin University in Australia developed a theoretical model to forecast the fundamental chemical reactions involving molecular hydrogen (H2), which after many decades and attempts by scientists had remained largely unpredicted and unsolved.