Earth

CHICAGO – Putting a new spin on the concept of "stress eating," research presented at the 2013 Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting & Expo® found that people who eat during times of stress typically seek the foods they eat out of habit – regardless of how healthy or unhealthy that food is.

The research co-authored and presented by David Neal, Ph.D., a psychologist and founding partner at Empirica Research, contradicts the conventional wisdom that people who are stressed-out turn to high-calorie, low-nutrient comfort food.

CHICAGO—Healthy snacks that promote a feeling of fullness (satiety) may reduce the amount of food intake at subsequent meals and limit overall food consumption, according to a presentation today at the 2013 Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting & Food Expo in Chicago®.

Spurred by increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, forests over the last two decades have become dramatically more efficient in how they use water.

Scientists affiliated with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site report the results in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Harvard Forest is one of 26 such NSF LTER sites in ecosystems from deserts to grasslands, coral reefs to coastal waters, around the world.

Supraglacial lakes – bodies of water that collect on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet – lubricate the bottom of the sheet when they drain, causing it to flow faster. Differences in how the lakes drain can impact glacial movement's speed and direction, researchers from The City College of New York (CCNY), University of Cambridge and Los Alamos National Laboratory report in "Environmental Research Letters."

Picture two residential beach communities on the New Jersey shore: Bay Head and Mantoloking, which sit side-by-side in Ocean County on a narrow barrier island that separates the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay.

Before Hurricane Sandy landed on Oct. 29, 2012, a motorist traveling north on Ocean Avenue would seamlessly travel through Mantoloking into Bay Head, noticing few changes in residential development, dunes, beaches, and shoreline.

The difference was hidden under the sand.

Research published in the journal Science (5th July 2013) shows that allowing land use to be determined purely by agricultural markets results in considerable financial and environmental costs to the public. While the research has looked specifically at the UK, the same methods could be applied to any area of the world with similar results for many countries. Land use in most of Europe is dominated by agriculture.

While thermal expansion of the ocean and melting mountain glaciers are the most important factors causing sea-level change today, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be the dominant contributors within the next two millennia, according to the findings. Half of that rise might come from ice-loss in Antarctica which is currently contributing less than 10 percent to global sea-level rise.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study estimates that global sea levels will rise about 2.3 meters, or more than seven feet, over the next several thousand years for every degree (Celsius) the planet warms.

This international study is one of the first to combine analyses of four major contributors to potential sea level rise into a collective estimate, and compare it with evidence of past sea-level responses to global temperature changes.

Chestnut Hill, MA (July 15, 2013) – Chemists at Boston College and Nagoya University in Japan have synthesized the first example of a new form of carbon, the team reports in the most recent online edition of the journal Nature Chemistry.

Tropical trees and hanging vines burst into flower, showering the ground below with bright blossoms. Temperature, rather than cloud cover, may be key to the timing of tropical flowering events according to research at two sites in the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory Network published online in Nature Climate Change.

Scientists discovered a significant increase in flower production—about 3 percent more flowers produced on average per year since 1987—on Barro Colorado Island's Forest Dynamics Plot in Panama.

UPTON, NY-In the search for understanding how some magnetic materials can be transformed to carry electric current with no energy loss, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have made an important advance: Using an experimental technique they developed to measure the energy required for electrons to pair up and how that energy varies with direction, they've identified the factors needed for magnetically mediated superconductivity-as well as those that aren't.

It is not unusual for swarms of small earthquakes to precede a volcanic eruption. They can reach a point of such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor that resembles sound made by various types of musical instruments, though at frequencies much lower than humans can hear.

A new analysis of an eruption sequence at Alaska's Redoubt Volcano in March 2009 shows that the harmonic tremor glided to substantially higher frequencies and then stopped abruptly just before six of the eruptions, five of them coming in succession.

At the end of the last Ice Age, as the world began to warm, a swath of the North Pacific Ocean came to life. During a brief pulse of biological productivity 14,000 years ago, this stretch of the sea teemed with phytoplankton, amoeba-like foraminifera and other tiny creatures, who thrived in large numbers until the productivity ended—as mysteriously as it began—just a few hundred years later.

Alexandria, VA – One of the greatest controversies in science is what's underneath the Yellowstone supervolcano. The controversy surrounds a unique relationship between a mantle plume (like the one that powers Hawaiian volcanoes) and the subduction zone off the Washington-Oregon coast. Cutting-edge research using a common kitchen ingredient is explored in the latest issue of EARTH Magazine.

NJIT Professor Michel Boufadel, is a co-author of a new expert report on the effects of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) Mississippi Canyon-252 oil spill on ecosystem services in the Gulf of Mexico.