Earth

Biochemical sleuthing by an Indiana University graduate student has ended a nearly 50-year-old search to find a megamolecule in bacterial cell walls commonly used as a target for antibiotics, but whose presence had never been identified in the bacterium responsible for the most commonly reported sexually transmitted disease in the United States.

SAN FRANCISCO—Less than 20 miles from the site where melting ice exposed the 5,000-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman, scientists have discovered new and compelling evidence that the Italian Alps are warming at an unprecedented rate.

Part of that evidence comes in the form of a single dried-out leaf from a larch tree that grew thousands of years ago.

SAN FRANCISCO—From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakes—and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

That's about 40 percent more than previously thought, according to a new analysis of these Arctic storms.

A 40 percent difference in the number of cyclones could be important to anyone who lives north of 55 degrees latitude—the area of the study, which includes the northern reaches of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, along with the state of Alaska.

Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 11, 2103 -- Figuring that if some is good, more must be better, researchers have been trying to pack more graphene, a supermaterial, into structural composites. Collaborative research led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln materials engineers discovered that, in this case, less is more.

In a paper appearing in Nature's Scientific Reports, Dr. Ramesh Mani, professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University, reports that, in the presence of a magnetic field, negative resistivity can produce a positive resistance, along with a sign reversal in the Hall effect, in GaAs/AlGaAs semiconductor devices.

The risk posed by tsunami waves generated by Canary Island landslides may need to be re-evaluated, according to researchers at the National Oceanography Centre. Their findings suggest that these landslides result in smaller tsunami waves than previously thought by some authors, because of the processes involved.

Brigham Young University geologists found evidence of some of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth's history right in their own backyard.

These supervolcanoes aren't active today, but 30 million years ago more than 5,500 cubic kilometers of magma erupted during a one-week period near a place called Wah Wah Springs. By comparison, this eruption was about 5,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geology articles posted online ahead of print on 6 Dec. cover fossil estuarine fauna from the Austrian Miocene; a "natural wind tunnel" experiment on the Chinese Loess Plateau; frictional melting of a microgabbro in water; glacial moraines in Colorado; new topographic data from Venus; solving a major issue concerning melt extraction from Earth's mantle; and experimentally generated volcanic lightning.

Stanford scientists may have solved the mystery of what drives a type of earthquake that occurs deep within the Earth and accounts for one in four quakes worldwide.

Known as intermediate-depth earthquakes, these temblors originate farther down inside the Earth than shallow earthquakes, which take place in the uppermost layer of the Earth's surface, called the crust. The kinds of quakes that afflict California and most other places in the world are shallow earthquakes.

"The shape of the bedforms that make up the barrier system did not change a whole lot," said co-Principal Investigator (PI) John Goff of the Institute for Geophysics. "Where we might have expected to see significant erosion based on long-term history, not a lot happened — nothing that ate into the shoreface."

"The sand largely took the blow," added co-PI Jamie Austin of the Institute for Geophysics. "Like a good barricade, the barrier system absorbed the significant blow, but held."

A groundbreaking study by Harvard University's Harvard Forest and the Smithsonian Institution reveals that, if left unchecked, recent trends in the loss of forests to development will undermine significant land conservation gains in Massachusetts, jeopardize water quality, and limit the natural landscape's ability to protect against climate change.

Physicists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics measure the duration of energetic electron pulses using laser fields.

Rivers and streams release carbon dioxide at a rate five times greater than the world's lakes and reservoirs combined, contrary to common belief.

Research from the University of Waterloo was a key component of the international study, the findings of which appear in a recent issue of the journal Nature.

Scientists from U of T's Department of Chemistry have discovered a novel chemical lurking in the atmosphere that appears to be a long-lived greenhouse gas (LLGHG). The chemical – perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA) – is the most radiatively efficient chemical found to date, breaking all other chemical records for its potential to impact climate.

Radiative efficiency describes how effectively a molecule can affect climate. This value is then multiplied by its atmospheric concentration to determine the total climate impact.

Traditional plastics, or polymers, are electrical insulators. In the seventies a new class of polymers that conduct electricity like semiconductors and metals was discovered by Alan J.Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa. This was the motivation for their Nobel Prize in Chemistry year 2000. Now Xavier Crispin, Docent in organic electronics at Linköping University's Department of Science and Technology, has led a project where no fewer than twenty researchers from five universities worldwide have collaborated to prove that polymers can also be semimetals.