Earth

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Discussions on curbing climate change tend to focus on comprehensive, emissions-focused measures: a global cap-and-trade scheme aimed at controlling carbon, or a tax on all carbon emissions. But a new study by researchers at MIT finds that a "segmental" approach — involving separate targeting of energy choices and energy consumption through regulations or incentives — can play an important role in achieving emission reductions.

Despite their changed body size, pregnant women are just as good as other people at judging whether they are able to fit through openings, such as doorways, or not. This is thanks to a process called perceptual-motor recalibration that helps people to adjust their spatial awareness of their environment based on changes in their body's size and abilities, says John Franchak and Karen Adolph of New York University in the US.

Atomic force microscopes are able to reproduce spectacular images, at the scale of single atoms. This is made possible by the oscillation of a very sharp probe tip over the surface being observed. The tip never touches the surface but gets so close to it, at distances in the order of one billionth of a metre, that it "feels" the force due to the interaction with the atoms making up the material being observed. These are tiny forces, in the order of nanonewtons (meaning one billion times smaller than the weight of an apple).

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, at the request of the South Australian State Government, studied the condition of the forest sector industries in the Green Triangle region and examined the added value that may be achievable through high technology production.

VTT proposed seven pathways to raise short-term local production value and establish specialised biorefinery business in the longer term.

Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) at James Cook University are engaging social science to help solve some of the world's biggest environmental problems.

Dr Christina Hicks, an interdisciplinary social science fellow at the ARC CoECRS, holds a joint position with the Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University in the USA.

Dr Hicks says more powerful economic interests, such as tourism, currently drive coral reef management. Little thought is given to community needs such as food or wellbeing. This results in conflict.

In collaboration with the University of Basel, an international team of researchers has observed a strong energy loss caused by frictional effects in the vicinity of charge density waves. This may have practical significance in the control of nanoscale friction. The results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Materials.

Friction is often seen as an adverse phenomenon that leads to wear and causes energy loss. Conversely, however, too little friction can be a disadvantage as well – for example, running on an icy surface or driving on a wet road.

South Pole Telescope scientists have detected for the first time a subtle distortion in the oldest light in the universe, which may help reveal secrets about the earliest moments in the universe's formation.

WASHINGTON, D.C. Dec. 13, 2013 -- Ultrasound-stimulated microbubbles have been showing promise in recent years as a non-invasive way to break up dangerous blood clots. But though many researchers have studied the effectiveness of this technique, not much was understood about why it works. Now a team of researchers in Toronto has collected the first direct evidence showing how these wiggling microbubbles cause a blood clot's demise. The team's findings are featured in the AIP Publishing journal Applied Physics Letters.

WASHINGTON - Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Michael L. Connor released the Santa Ana River Watershed Basin Study, which addresses water supply and demand projections for the next 50 years and identifies potential climate change impacts to Southern California's Santa Ana River Watershed. This study is a first of its kind for the predominately urban basin. It encompasses approximately 2,600 square miles in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties and is home to more than 6 million residents.

Although researchers have determined the ages of rocks from other planetary bodies, the actual experiments—like analyzing meteorites and moon rocks—have always been done on Earth. Now, for the first time, researchers have successfully determined the age of a Martian rock—with experiments performed on Mars. The work, led by geochemist Ken Farley of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), could not only help in understanding the geologic history of Mars but also aid in the search for evidence of ancient life on the planet.

Boulder, Colo., USA - In the latest issue of The Geological Society of America journal Lithosphere: Learn more about the Great Slave Lake shear zone in northwest Canada (open access article); the tectonic development of the Tibetan Plateau; and two flysch belts. Also in this issue: an open-access review article on crustal melting, ductile flow, and deformation in mountain belts.

A team of international researchers, led by Monash University's Associate Professor Wouter Schellart, have developed a new global map of subduction zones, illustrating which ones are predicted to be capable of generating giant earthquakes and which ones are not.

The new research, published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, comes nine years after the giant earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra in December 2004, which devastated the region and many other areas surrounding the Indian Ocean, and killed more than 200,000 people.

Istanbul, Turkey – 12 December 2013: The first test to identify acute mountain sickness has been developed by a team of researchers in Italy and France and is presented today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2013. The test could revolutionise trekking and climbing by predicting who will develop the potentially deadly condition so they can avoid high altitudes, ascend more gradually or take preventative medication.

NASA scientists have revealed the inner workings of the ozone hole that forms annually over Antarctica and found that declining chlorine in the stratosphere has not yet caused a recovery of the ozone hole.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Increasing temperatures and changes in the timing of snowmelt runoff could impact the amount of water available on the upper Rio Grande in the future. These are some of the results of the Upper Rio Grande Impact Assessment released by Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Anne Castle.