Earth

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Cutting the amount of short-lived, climate-warming emissions such as soot and methane in our skies won't limit global warming as much as previous studies have suggested, a new analysis shows. The study also found a comprehensive climate policy would produce more climate benefits by 2050 than if soot and methane were reduced alone.

ANN ARBOR -- New irrigation systems in arid regions benefit farmers but can increase the local malaria risk for more than a decade -- which is longer than previously believed -- despite intensive and costly use of insecticides, new University of Michigan-led study in northwest India concludes.

The study's findings demonstrate the need to include a strong, binding commitment to finance and implement long-term public health and safety programs when building large-scale irrigation projects, according to the researchers.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Scientists have discovered a super-charged methane seep in the ocean off New Zealand that has created its own unique food web, resulting in much more methane escaping from the ocean floor into the water column.

What's good for adults is not always best for the young, and vice versa. At least that is the case with song sparrows and how they experience the effects of climate change, according to two recent studies by scientists at the University of California, Davis, and Point Blue Conservation Science.

Both studies show the importance of considering the various stages and ages of individuals in a species -- from babies to juveniles to adults -- to best predict not only how climate change could affect a species as a whole, but also why.

WASHINGTON D.C. August 12, 2013 -- Some time around 37,000 BCE a massive volcano erupted in the Campanian region of Italy, blanketing much of Europe with ash, stunting plant growth and possibly dooming the Neanderthals. While our prehistoric relatives had no way to know the ash cloud was coming, a recent study provides a new tool that may have predicted what path volcanic debris would take.

Research groups at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Physical-Technical Federal Institute (PTB) in Braunschweig, working in collaboration with scientists at the University of Ulm and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have been investigating the formation of defects occurring when a Coulomb crystal of ions is driven through a second-order phase transition. For this purpose, they compressed one-dimensional linear chains of ions at high speeds to form a two-dimensional zigzag structure with a form similar to that of an accordion.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Science and technology have peeled back a veil of water just offshore of California, revealing the hidden seafloor in unprecedented detail. New imagery, specialized undersea maps, and a wealth of data from along the California coast are now available. Three new products in an ongoing series were released today by the U.S. Geological Survey — a map set for the area offshore of Carpinteria, a catalog of data layers for geographic information systems, and a collection of videos and photos of the seafloor in state waters along the entire California coast.

Computer simulations have revealed how the electrical conductivity of many materials increases with a strong electrical field in a universal way. This development could have significant implications for practical systems in electrochemistry, biochemistry, electrical engineering and beyond.

In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west coast of North America. Though it was powerful enough to cause a tsunami as far as Japan, a lack of local documentation has made studying this historic event challenging.

Benjamin Horton, Professor in the Institute of Marine and Coastal Science at Rutgers University, and colleagues have helped unlock this geological mystery using a fossil-based technique.

Their work provides a finer-grained portrait of this earthquake and the changes in coastal land level it produced, enabling modelers to better prepare for future events.

TEMPE, Ariz. – One of the biggest mysteries in contemporary particle physics and cosmology is why dark energy, which is observed to dominate energy density of the universe, has a remarkably small (but not zero) value. This value is so small, it is perhaps 120 orders of magnitude less than would be expected based on fundamental physics.

Resolving this problem, often called the cosmological constant problem, has so far eluded theorists.

WASHINGTON D.C. August 9, 2013 -- For most of us, a modern lifestyle without polymers is unthinkable…if only we knew what they were. The ordinary hardware-store terms we use for them include "plastics, polyethylene, epoxy resins, paints, adhesives, rubber" -- without ever recognizing the physical and chemical structures shared by this highly varied -- and talented -- family of engineering materials.

Washington, D.C—The key to understanding Earth's evolution is to look at how heat is conducted in the deep lower mantle—a region some 400 to 1,800 miles (660 to 2,900 kilometers) below the surface. Researchers at the Carnegie Institution, with colleagues at the University of Illinois, have for the first time been able to experimentally simulate the pressure conditions in this region to measure thermal conductivity using a new measurement technique developed by the collaborators and implemented by the Carnegie team on the mantle material magnesium oxide (MgO).

NOAA scientists report the discovery of the first known colony of table coral off of the south shore of O'ahu in Hawai'i. A report on the discovery was published last month in the Bulletin of Marine Science.

Given its common name due to its flat-topped, table-like shape, table coral (Acropora cytherea) is one of the primary reef-building corals throughout most of the tropical Pacific, but it has never been observed in waters off O'ahu - until now, researchers said. The coral, estimated to be 14 years old, was found at a depth of 60 feet during a training dive.

Researchers at JILA have for the first time used an atomic clock as a quantum simulator, mimicking the behavior of a different, more complex quantum system.*

If one wants to better understand how plants grow, one must analyse the chemistry of life in its molecular detail. Michael Hothorn from the Friedrich-Miescher-Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen and his team are doing just that. Their latest work now reveals that a plant membrane receptor requires a helper protein to sense a growth-promoting steroid hormone and to transduce this signal across the cell membrane.