Earth

Using data from a NASA satellite, a team of scientists led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and involving the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered a massive particle accelerator in the heart of one of the harshest regions of near-Earth space, a region of super-energetic, charged particles surrounding the globe known as the Van Allen radiation belts.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass- A superfluid moves like a completely frictionless liquid, seemingly able to propel itself without any hindrance from gravity or surface tension. The physics underlying these materials — which appear to defy the conventional laws of physics — has fascinated scientists for decades.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study published this week in the journal Nature reveals for the first time how the mixing of cold, deep waters from below can change sea surface temperatures on seasonal and longer timescales.

Because this occurs in a huge region of the ocean that takes up heat from the atmosphere, these changes can influence global climate patterns, particularly global warming.

The Kondo effect in 1982 earned the Nobel Prize in Physics to Kenneth Wilson – the American physicist who passed away this year – who had solved numerically such solid-state physics "problem". Now a group of scientists, including some researchers of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste have explored a lesser known variant, predicting theoretically that the phenomenon can be actually observed, and describing its behavior in detail.

Quantum physics concerns a world of infinitely small things. But for years, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have been attempting to observe the properties of quantum physics on a larger scale, even macroscopic. In January 2011, they managed to entangle crystals, therefore surpassing the atomic dimension. Now, Professor Nicolas Gisin's team has successfully entangled two optic fibers, populated by 500 photons.

This news release is available in German.

The coral-stromatoporoid reef disappearing from the planet earth was one of the most significant and representative phenomena for the Late Devonian F-F transitional mass extinction event. Professor GONG Yiming and his group (Wu Yibu, Feng Qi etc.) from State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology of China University of Geosciences are trying to tackle this problem.

In recent decades there has been increased variability in yearly temperature records for large parts of Europe and North America, according to a study published online today (24th July 2013) in Nature.

The study was carried out by scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the University of East Anglia and the University of Exeter.

Researchers have warned of an "economic time-bomb" in the Arctic, following a ground-breaking analysis of the likely cost of methane emissions in the region.

The prolonged heat wave that has bathed the UK in sunshine over the past month has given the country an unexpected taste of summer that has seemed to be missing in recent years.

However, a new study published today, 24 July, in IOP Publishing's Environmental Research Letters, has provided warnings that will chime with those accustomed to more typical British weather.

In many plants, flowers occur in inflorescences, clusters that develop through almost mathematical branching patterns. These patterns strongly impact the size and number of seeds and the success of pollination, which is why they are often conserved by natural selection over long evolutionary periods. But Elizabeth Kellogg from the University of Missouri, together with colleagues from Brazil, the UK, and Australia, here shows that around 40 million years ago there was an abrupt evolutionary transition in the branching pattern of inflorescences of cool-season grasses (subfamily Pooideae).

A simple, low-cost and eco-friendly method of creating nitrogen-doped graphene nanoplatelets (NGnPs), which could be used in dye-sensitized solar cells and fuel cells, is published in Scientific Reports today. The work, carried out at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea, could be a step towards replacing conventional platinum (Pt)-based catalysts for energy conversion.

Protons, as positively charged hydrogen ions, move very rapidly in water from one water molecule to the next, which is why the conductivity of water is relatively high. The principle of proton conduction in water has been known for 200 years and is named the Grotthuss mechanism after its discoverer, Theodor Grotthuss. It is based on the assumption that it is not that a single specific proton moving from one molecule to another; instead, there is cleavage of bonds.

In 2006 the island of Java, Indonesia was struck by a devastating earthquake followed by the onset of a mud eruption to the east, flooding villages over several square kilometers and that continues to erupt today. Until now, researchers believed the earthquake was too far from the mud volcano to trigger the eruption. Geophysicists at the University of Bonn, Germany and ETH Zurich, Switzerland use computer-based simulations to show that such triggering is possible over long distances. The results have been published in "Nature Geoscience."

Rising temperatures, influenced by natural events such as El Niño, have a corresponding increase in the release of carbon dioxide from tropical forest ecosystems, according to a new study out today.