Earth

Just a single foreign atom located in the vicinity of a molecule can change spatial arrangement of its atoms. In a spectacular experiment, an international team of researchers was able to change persistently positions of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in a porphycene molecule by approaching a single copper atom to the molecule.

The intensity of tropical cyclones hitting East Asia has significantly increased over the past 30 years, according to a new study published today.

The coastlines of China, Korea and Japan in particular have experienced increasingly stronger cyclones, which the researchers have attributed to increasing sea surface temperatures and a change in atmospheric circulation patterns over the coastal seas.

Montreal, January 15, 2014 — When it comes to global warming, there are seven big contributors: the United States, China, Russia, Brazil, India, Germany and the United Kingdom. A new study published in Environmental Research Letters reveals that these countries were collectively responsible for more than 60 per cent of pre-2005 global warming. Uniquely, it also assigns a temperature change value to each country that reflects its contribution to observed global warming.

"The interface is the device," Nobel laureate Herbert Kroemer famously observed, referring to the remarkable properties to be found at the junctures where layers of different materials meet. In today's burgeoning world of nanotechnology, the interfaces between layers of metal oxides are becoming increasingly prominent, with applications in such high-tech favorites as spintronics, high-temperature superconductors, ferroelectrics and multiferroics.

The once-booming, now struggling Olympia oyster native to the West Coast could face a double threat from ocean acidification and invasive predators, according to new research from the University of California, Davis' Bodega Marine Laboratory. The work is published Jan. 15 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Computer security systems may one day get a boost from quantum physics, as a result of recent research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Computer scientist Yi-Kai Liu has devised away to make a security device that has proved notoriously difficult to build—a "one-shot" memory unit, whose contents can be read only a single time.

As if being sick weren't bad enough, there's also the fear of frequent injections, side effects and overdosing on you medication. Now a team of researchers from University of Copenhagen, Department of Chemistry, Nano- science center and the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), have shown that reservoirs of anti-viral pharmaceuticals could be manufactured to bind specifically to infected tissue such as cancer cells for the slow concentrated delivery of drug treatments.

ARGONNE, Ill. (Jan. 13, 2014) -- Humans have for ages taken cues from nature to build their own devices, but duplicating the steps in the complicated electronic dance of photosynthesis remains one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for chemists.

Boulder, Colo., USA – Geology adds 19 new articles online, covering locations in China, the Atacama Desert, the Himalaya, Kilauea volcano, Australia, the Mediterranean basin, the Gulf of California, the southern Andes, the Gulf of Cadiz, the northern Red Sea, and offshore Japan. Oceanography is an emphasis in many of the papers, and several articles incorporate modeling studies. Three articles in this collection are open access.

Open Access Papers

Doctoral student Florian Vogel and Dr. Nelia Wanderka from the HZB Institute of Applied Materials have elegantly combined two methods to accomplish this: transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atom probe tomography (APT), which they carried out in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Münster.

The next time you light a candle and switch on your television ready for a relaxing evening at home, just think. These two vastly different products have much more in common than you might imagine.

Research recently carried out by Prof Tanja Schilling and associates, Muhammad Anwar and Francesco Turci, at the Physics and Material Science Research Unit of the University of Luxembourg made this surprising connection, which works as follows.

Los Angeles, CA (January 14, 2014) A new study out today in SAGE Open finds that instead of breaking stereotypes, intellectually successful Black individuals may be susceptible to being remembered as "Whiter" and therefore 'exceptions to their race,' perpetuating cultural beliefs about race and intelligence. This new study shows that a Black man who is associated with being educated is remembered as being lighter in skin tone than he actually is, a phenomenon the study authors refer to as "skin tone memory bias."

Alexandria, VA – What goes into a great wine and what role does geology play? Wine experts use the word terroir to describe the myriad environmental influences, including climate, that go into growing winegrapes. Climate is arguably the most influential factor and it produces the most identifiable differences among wines. So how is climate change affecting wines globally? And how do other factors, such as the bedrock below the vineyard and the soil, produce subtle expressions in wine?

Understanding collective behavior of ultra-cold quantum gases is of great interest since it is intimately related to many encountered systems in nature such as human behavior, swarms of birds, traffic jam, sand dunes, neutron stars, fundamental magnetic properties of solids, or even super-fluidity or super-conductivity. In all of these everyday life examples, collective behavior plays a crucial role since all participating objects move, voluntarily or not, synchronously.

Four years after the January 2010 earthquake, 145,000 people still remain homeless in Haiti. A cheap and simple technology to repair earthquake damaged buildings – developed at the University of Sheffield – could help to reduce these delays by quickly making buildings safe and habitable.

Recent tests showed that a damaged building repaired using the technique could withstand a major earthquake – similar in scale and proximity to the buildings that collapsed during the Haiti earthquake.