Earth

Male túngara frogs call from puddles to attract females. The production of the call incidentally creates ripples that spread across the water. Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama revealed that these ripples are used by other male frogs to assess the level of competition in the puddle. Unfortunately for the frogs, their main predator, the frog-eating bat, senses the ripples too, making the frogs easier targets.

How would electrons behave if confined to a wire so slender they could pass through it only in single-file?

The question has intrigued scientists for more than half a century. In 1950, Japanese Nobel Prize winner Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, followed by American physicist Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger in 1963, came up with a mathematical model showing that the effects of one particle on all others in a one-dimensional line would be much greater than in two- or three-dimensional spaces. Among quantum physicists, this model came to be known as the "Luttinger liquid" state.

Biochemical reactions sometimes have to handle dangerous things in a safe way. New work from researchers at UC Davis and Stanford University shows how cyanide and carbon monoxide are safely bound to an iron atom to construct an enzyme that can generate hydrogen gas. The work is published Jan. 24 in the journal Science.

Bremerhaven/Germany, 24 January 2014. In spring 2010, the research icebreaker Polarstern returned from the South Pacific with a scientific treasure - ocean sediments from a previously almost unexplored part of the South Polar Sea. What looks like an inconspicuous sample of mud to a layman is, to geological history researchers, a valuable archive from which they can reconstruct the climatic history of the polar areas over many years of analysis. This, in turn, is of fundamental importance for understanding global climatic development.

The gradual warming of the North and tropical Atlantic Ocean is contributing to climate change in Antarctica, a team of New York University (NYU) scientists supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) has concluded.

Their findings appear in the Jan. 23 edition of the journal Nature.

Their work draws from more than three decades of atmospheric data and shows new ways in which distant regional conditions are contributing to Antarctic climate change.

UK researchers have identified a biological mechanism that could explain how the Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate were stabilised over the past 24 million years. When CO2 levels became too low for plants to grow properly, forests appear to have kept the climate in check by slowing down the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The results are now published in Biogeosciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

An army of citizen scientists has helped the professionals understand how a tiny 'alien' moth is attacking the UK's conker (horse-chestnut) trees, and showed that naturally-occurring pest controlling wasps are not able to restrict the moth's impact.

The study's conclusions are published this week in the open access scientific journal PLOS ONE.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Every picture tells a story, but the story digital photos tell about how forests respond to climate change could be incomplete, according to new research.

BOULDER, Colo -- Heralding a new age of terrific timekeeping, a research group led by a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) physicist has unveiled an experimental strontium atomic clock that has set new world records for both precision and stability-- key metrics for the performance of a clock.

The clock is in a laboratory at JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The gradual warming of the North and Tropical Atlantic Ocean is contributing to climate change in Antarctica, a team of New York University scientists has concluded. The findings, which rely on more than three decades of atmospheric data and appear in the journal Nature, show new ways in which distant regional conditions are contributing to Antarctic climate change.

SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Jan. 21, 2014)— Like an amphitheater amplifies sound, the stiff, sturdy soil beneath the Greater Vancouver metropolitan area could greatly amplify the effects of an earthquake, pushing the potential devastation past what building codes in the region are prepared for. That's the conclusion behind a pair of studies recently coauthored by San Diego State University seismologist Kim Olsen.

If you were a shrew snuffling around a North American forest, you would be 27 times less likely to respond to climate change than if you were a moose grazing nearby.

That is just one of the findings of a new University of Colorado Boulder assessment led by Assistant Professor Christy McCain that looked at more than 1,000 different scientific studies on North American mammal responses to human-caused climate change. The CU-Boulder team eventually selected 140 scientific papers containing population responses from 73 North American mammal species for their analysis.

The National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorders has released its much-anticipated update on evidence-based practices for children and youth with autism. Scientists at UNC's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute spearheaded the project, screening 29,000 articles about autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to locate the soundest research on interventions for children from birth to age 22.

If your husband is absent-minded, forgets your wedding anniversary or the name of your new neighbor, don't worry. You are not the only one with a forgetful man in the house. Even researchers were surprised by how much men forget.

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Throughout history, humans have responded to climate.