Earth

The engineering feat that enables a device to jolt a dangerously misbehaving heart back to its normal rhythm and save millions of lives is featured in a new video from the popular Prized Science series from the American Chemical Society (ACS). The video is available at http://www.acs.org/PrizedScience.

WASHINGTON -- Climate change has increased concern over possible large and rapid changes in the physical climate system, which includes the Earth's atmosphere, land surfaces, and oceans. Some of these changes could occur within a few decades or even years, leaving little time for society and ecosystems to adapt.

Montreal, 2 December 2013 — As a result of the fracking revolution, North America has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world's largest producer of oil and gas. This, despite endless protests from environmentalists. But does drilling for natural gas really cause pollution levels to skyrocket?

Setting the bar

In celebration of the 85th anniversary for the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, we publish this special issue of Science China-Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, which serves as a venue to display a small part of the research activities currently undertaken by us. This special issue contains one essay and 19 research articles. The prelude by the director of the Institute of Physics presents the highlights of chief achievements in the past five years.

FORT COLLINS, Colo., Recent Forest Service studies on high-elevation climate trends in the Pacific Northwest United States show that streamflow declines tie directly to decreases and changes in winter winds that bring precipitation across the region. Scientists believe the driving factors behind this finding relates to natural climate variations and man-made climate change.

When engineers design devices, they must often join together two materials that expand and contract at different rates as temperatures change. Such thermal differences can cause problems if, for instance, a semiconductor chip is plugged into a socket that can't expand and contract rapidly enough to maintain an unbroken contact over time.

The potential for failure at such critical junctures has intensified as devices have shrunk to the nano scale, bringing subtle forces into play that tug at atoms and molecules, causing strains that are difficult to observe, much less avoid.

HOUSTON – (Dec. 2, 2013) – Humble aluminum's plasmonic properties may make it far more valuable than gold and silver for certain applications, according to new research by Rice University scientists.

Because aluminum, as nanoparticles or nanostructures, displays optical resonances across a much broader region of the spectrum than either gold or silver, it may be a good candidate for harvesting solar energy and for other large-area optical devices and materials that would be too expensive to produce with noble or coinage metals.

A chemical system developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago can efficiently perform the first step in the process of creating syngas, gasoline and other energy-rich products out of carbon dioxide.

A novel "co-catalyst" system using inexpensive, easy to fabricate carbon-based nanofiber materials efficiently converts carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, a useful starting-material for synthesizing fuels. The findings have been published online in advance of print in the journal Nature Communications.

Europe needs to plan for future probabilities of extreme weather. Heat waves, floods and storms do not respect national frontiers, so there is a need for action at both national and EU levels.

Small difference, large effect: Most biological molecules occur in two variants, an original and its mirror image. As a result, they are related to one another like the left hand to the right. For instance, the left- and right-handed variant of the same molecule makes lemons smell different from oranges. This so-called chirality also plays an important role in pharmaceutical research.

On 27 February 2010 an earthquake of magnitude 8.8 struck South-Central Chile near the town of Maule. The main shock displaced the subduction interface by up to 16 meters. Like usually after strong earthquakes a series of aftershocks occurred in the region with decreasing size over the next months. A surprising result came from an afterslip study: Up to 2 meters additional slip occurred along the plate interface within 420 days only, in a pulse like fashion and without associated seismicity.

They are the coldest objects in the Universe and are so fragile that even a single photon can heat and destroy them.

Known as Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) and consisting of just a cluster of atoms, it has up until now been impossible to measure and control these remarkable forms of matter simultaneously.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27, 2013 – Mention vuvuzela to soccer fans, and they may cringe. The plastic horn rose to prominence during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where tens of thousands of those instruments blared in packed stadiums. The loud, buzzing noise soon became a major annoyance, disrupting players and even fans watching on TV.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27, 2013 – Scientists have recorded and identified one of the most prominent sounds of a warming planet: the sizzle of glacier ice as it melts into the sea. The noise, caused by trapped air bubbles squirting out of the disappearing ice, could provide clues to the rate of glacier melt and help researchers better monitor the fast-changing polar environments.

The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') award-winning Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions podcast series features an advance in smartphone-based imaging that could help physicians in resource-limited locations monitor their patients' health. The development converts smartphones into powerful mini-microscopes that, for the first time, can detect individual viruses.