Earth

The continued accumulation of sand within the iconic ring-shaped reefs inside Maldivian atolls could provide a foundation for future island development new research suggests. Islands like the Maldives are considered likely to be the first to feel the effects of climate change induced sea level rise, with future island growth essential to counter the threat of rising sea levels.

A new research paper shows that a great number of nearby terrigenous pollen and charcoal have been found from the deep-sea sediments of the last 200 kyrs in Okinawa Trough. It is tesitfied that the continental shelf of the East China Sea was exposed and covered with the huge wetland and grassland ecosystems during the the last two glacial periods. They discovered that the variation of terrestrial sources is concordent with global glacial volume and sea-level changes at orbital-scale since 200 kyrs before present.

A team of scientists, including M. Lisa Manning, assistant professor of physics in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences, has developed a model for studying tissue—specifically how it organizes into organs and layers during embryonic development.

Their findings are the subject of a Sept. 25th article in the journal Interface (Royal Society Publishing, 2013) and may have major implications for the study of tissue pattern formation and malformation.

Oxygen appeared in the atmosphere up to 700 million years earlier than we previously thought, according to research published today in the journal Nature, raising new questions about the evolution of early life.

Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it.

Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25 paper in Nature.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Dams have been vilified for detrimental effects to water quality and fish passage, but a new study suggests that these structures provide "ecological and engineering resilience" to climate change in the Columbia River basin.

Since 1993, oceanographers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), have carried out regularly expeditions to the Greenland Sea on board the research ice breaker Polarstern to investigate the changes in this region. The programme has always included extensive temperature and salinity measurements. For the present study, the AWI scientists have combined these long term data set with historical observations dating back to the year 1950.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Coal-powered synthetic natural gas plants being planned in China would produce seven times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional natural gas plants, and use up to 100 times the water as shale gas production, according to a new study by Duke University researchers.

These environmental costs have been largely neglected in the drive to meet the nation's growing energy needs, the researchers say, and might lock China on an irreversible and unsustainable path for decades to come.

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COLUMBIA, Mo. – For years, scientists have thought that a continental ice sheet formed during the Late Cretaceous Period more than 90 million years ago when the climate was much warmer than it is today. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found evidence suggesting that no ice sheet formed at this time. This finding could help environmentalists and scientists predict what the earth's climate will be as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.

Cuckoo finches that lay more than one egg in their victims' nests have a better chance of bamboozling host parents into fostering their parasitic young, a study has found.

Dr Martin Stevens from the University of Exeter and Dr Claire Spottiswoode from the University of Cambridge, with Dr Jolyon Troscianko at the University of Exeter, demonstrated that when African cuckoo finch females lay more than one egg in the same nest of their African tawny-flanked prinia hosts, the foster parents find it harder to tell their own eggs from the imposter's.

WASHINGTON D.C. Sept. 24, 2013 -- The dream of igniting a self-sustained fusion reaction with high yields of energy, a feat likened to creating a miniature star on Earth, is getting closer to becoming reality, according the authors of a new review article in the journal Physics of Plasmas.

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres (JGR-D), Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth (JGR-B) and Paleoceanography.

In this release:

Hardly a spectroscopic method boasts so many different applications as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, better known as "NMR". The approach of NMR spectroscopy is based on monitoring the so-called nuclear spin, namely the angular momentum of atoms, or, more precisely: the magnetic moment associated with them. The atom thus becomes a bar magnet, whose axis is aligned within a magnetic field but is otherwise arbitrarily oriented within its environment. The alignment can be altered by applying electromagnetic radiation in the radio wavelength, typically at several 100 Megahertz.