Earth

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Americans are increasingly installing wind turbines near their homes, farms and businesses to generate their own energy, concludes a new report released today.

WASHINGTON D.C. August 6, 2013 -- The Large Area Picosecond Photodetector (LAPPD) collaboration has developed big detectors that push the timing envelope, measuring the speed of particles with a precision down to trillionths of a second.

As described in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, which is produced by the AIP Publishing, a team of researchers within the LAPPD collaboration developed an advanced facility for testing large area photodetectors -- with a level of spatial precision measured in micrometers and time resolutions at or below a picosecond.

A team of researchers led by North Carolina State University has developed a technique that provides real-time images of how magnesium changes at the atomic scale when exposed to radiation. The technique may give researchers new insights into how radiation weakens the integrity of radiation-tolerant materials, such as those used in space exploration and in nuclear energy technologies.

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, together with colleagues in the US and Australia, have developed a method to control a quantum bit for electronic quantum communication in a series of quantum dots, which behave like artificial atoms in the solid state. The results have been published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

A new pitfall trap designed to capture bed bugs is more effective than those currently on the market, according to the authors of an article appearing in the next issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology. The authors also found that traps baited with an experimental chemical lure mixture caught 2.2 times as many bed bugs as traps without the lure.

PITTSBURGH—Molecules could soon be "scanned" in a fashion similar to imaging screenings at airports, thanks to a detector developed by University of Pittsburgh physicists.

The detector, featured in a recent issue of Nano Letters, may have the ability to chemically identify single molecules using terahertz radiation—a range of light far below what the eye can detect.

August 5, 2013 – Signal Hill, CA – Tom Bowman, climate science communications expert and host of the Climate Report™ with Tom Bowman, interviews economist Chris Hope and oceanographer Peter Wadhams, two of the three authors of an article in the journal Nature that has stirred scientific controversy since its release on July 24, 2013.

Honolulu, HI – Future warming from fossil fuel burning could be more intense and longer-lasting than previously thought. This prediction emerges from a new study by Richard Zeebe at the University of Hawai'i who includes insights from episodes of climate change in the geologic past to inform projections of man-made future climate change. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forest Drought Stress in Southwest May Exceed Most Severe Droughts in Last Thousand Years: Severe wildfires and drought-induced tree deaths have increased greatly over the past two decades in the southwestern United States. Historical ecological sources about Southwest fire regimes and forest patterns over the past 10,000 years provide context for recent fire and vegetation trends. Specifically, these sources show that regional forest landscapes are greatly affected by interactive changes among human land management, climate and disturbances.

The global treaty that headed off destruction of earth's protective ozone layer has also prevented major disruption of global rainfall patterns, even though that was not a motivation for the treaty, according to a new study in the Journal of Climate.

If history's closest analog is any indication, the look of the oceans will change drastically in the future as the coming greenhouse world alters marine food webs and gives certain species advantages over others.

The world's most famous painting has now been created on the world's smallest canvas. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have "painted" the Mona Lisa on a substrate surface approximately 30 microns in width – or one-third the width of a human hair. The team's creation, the "Mini Lisa," demonstrates a technique that could potentially be used to achieve nanomanufacturing of devices because the team was able to vary the surface concentration of molecules on such short-length scales.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a way for photographers and microscopists to create a 3D image through a single lens, without moving the camera.

Published in the journal Optics Letters, this improbable-sounding technology relies only on computation and mathematics—no unusual hardware or fancy lenses. The effect is the equivalent of seeing a stereo image with one eye closed.

FROSTBURG, MD (August 5, 2013)—Climate changes how species interact with one another—and not just today. Scientists are studying trends from fossil records to understand how climate change impacted the world in the ancient past and to identify ways to predict how things may change in the future, according to a new study published in the August 2 issue of Science.

There is no high quality evidence that antioxidant supplements help to increase a woman's chances of having a baby, according to the results of a new systematic review. The review, published in The Cochrane Library, found women were no more likely to conceive when taking oral antioxidants and that there was limited information about potential harms.