Earth

Antarctic krill are usually less than 6 cm in length but their size belies the major role they play in sustaining much of the life in the Southern Ocean. They are the primary food source for many species of whales, seals, penguins and fish.

Krill are known to be sensitive to sea temperature, especially in the areas where they grow as adults. This has prompted scientists to try to understand how they might respond to the effects of further climate change.

It is well known to scientists that the three common phases of water – ice, liquid and vapor – can exist stably together only at a particular temperature and pressure, called the triple point.

Also well known is that the solid form of many materials can have numerous phases, but it is difficult to pinpoint the temperature and pressure for the points at which three solid phases can coexist stably.

Without the currently available plethora of X-ray methods, basic research in the physical sciences would be unthinkable. The methods are used in solid state physics, in the analysis of biological structures, and even art historians have X-rays to thank for many new insights. Now, scientists at the Helmholtz Center Berlin (HZB) have identified yet another area of application. The team around Dr. Martin Beye and Prof. Alexander Föhlisch was able to show that solids lend themselves to X-ray analysis based on nonlinear physical effects. Until now, this could only be done using laser analysis.

"Basically we are looking at how atoms and molecules interact in biochemical materials in solution", says Professor Dr. Emad Flear Aziz, leader of the Young Investigator Group for Functional Materials in Solution at the HZB and Professor at Freie Universität Berlin. Their now published work is based on a discovery by Aziz' team made three years before: They then analyzed samples with x-ray spectroscopy and observed the disappearance of photons at some specific photon energy. These results have been replicated by other teams worldwide.

MIAMI – August 20, 2013 -- A new computer simulation conducted at the University of Bristol (UB) and University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science has revealed the epic, ocean-spanning journeys travelled by millimetre-sized coral larvae through the world's seas.

The study, published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, is the first to recreate the oceanic paths along which corals disperse globally, and will eventually aid predictions of how coral reef distributions may shift with climate change.

Cambridge, Mass. – August 20, 2013 – Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated that they can change the intensity, phase, and polarization of light rays using a hologram-like design decorated with nanoscale structures.

As a proof of principle, the researchers have used it to create an unusual state of light called a radially polarized beam, which—because it can be focused very tightly—is important for applications like high-resolution lithography and for trapping and manipulating tiny particles like viruses.

According to Izaskun Casado-Arzuaga, ecosystems provide more services than what many people believe. And their value is not in fact limited to the possibilities they offer in terms of landscape, aesthetic aspects or leisure. Casado is one of the members of the research group into Landscape, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and, in her opinion, it is important to remember the other services offered by ecosystems.

Boulder, Colo., USA – Six new Gesophere articles, posted online on 14 Aug. 2013, offer insight into a variety of geologic problems, from the minute to the massive. Authors investigate inclusion and porosity patterns in a 23-carat carbonado diamond; sea-level change offshore of New Jersey (USA); a new age for Sierra Nevada faulting; a reconstruction of the dimensions and shape of the Great Basin over the past 500 million years; and deep-water perspectives on Hawaiian volcano growth.

BOULDER - When enough raindrops fall over land instead of the ocean, they begin to add up.

New research led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows that when three atmospheric patterns came together over the Indian and Pacific oceans, they drove so much precipitation over Australia in 2010 and 2011 that the world's ocean levels dropped measurably. Unlike other continents, the soils and topography of Australia prevent almost all of its precipitation from running off into the ocean.

Scientists have discovered a vast plume of iron and other micronutrients more than 1,000 km long billowing from hydrothermal vents in the South Atlantic Ocean. The finding, soon to be published in the journal Nature Geoscience, calls past estimates of iron abundances into question, and may challenge researchers' assumptions about iron sources in the world's seas.

Since records began in 1776, the people of Youngstown, Ohio had never experienced an earthquake. However, from January 2011, 109 tremors were recorded and new research in Geophysical Research-Solid Earth reveals how this may be the result of shale fracking.

In December 2010, Northstar 1, a well built to pump wastewater produced by fracking in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, came online. In the year that followed seismometers in and around Youngstown recorded 109 earthquakes; the strongest being a magnitude 3.9 earthquake on December 31, 2011.

Small prey fish can grow a bigger 'eye' on their rear fins as a way of distracting predators and dramatically boosting their chances of survival, new scientific research has found.

Researchers from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) have made a world-first discovery that, when constantly threatened with being eaten, small damsel fish not only grow a larger false 'eye spot' near their tail – but also reduce the size of their real eyes.

When plant roots detect the presence of roots of other species, they respond in an adaptive manner: by growing away from the competing roots and increasing the expression of 14 genes implicated in the response against pathogens, according to a study.

Christoph Schmid and colleagues grew the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana with or without a mild competitor, the mouse-ear hawkweed Hieracium pilosella, and measured changes in the level of expression of approximately 22000 A. thaliana genes.

Exceptional preservation of glass inclusions in intrusive rocks of the Siberian Large Igneous Province evidences evolutionary processes of tholeiitic basalts, the most common terrestrial magmas.

Silicate liquid immiscibility between aluminosilicate and iron-rich paired melts is recorded by melt pools in native iron. These unique snapshots of magma evolution prove that cooling and crystallizing basaltic magma reaches a two-liquid stability field, and two contrasting silicate melts split at large-scale.

Roots of lupine plants exude a gel that facilitates water uptake from the deeper, wetter soil layers, while preventing water loss from older roots closer to the surface, a new study reports.

Plants can respond to water shortage by reducing transpiration or by growing deeper roots, but also by modifying the soil. For example, roots exude mucilage, a gel that increases the water holding capacity ("wettability") of the soil.