Earth

In order to extend forecasting from six months to one year or even more, scientists have now proposed a novel approach based on advanced connectivity analysis applied to the climate system. The scheme builds on high-quality data of air temperatures and clearly outperforms existing methods. The study will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The pursuit that obsessed some of the world's greatest geniuses for centuries — alchemy and its quest for the "Philosopher's Stone" that would transform lead and other base metals into gold — is the topic of a new episode in the American Chemical Society Bytesize Science video series. The video, from the world's largest scientific society, is at http://www.BytesizeScience.com.

A new method designed to measure the aesthetic value of ecosystems has been applied in Cornwall. According to the research findings, Cornwall's beautiful rugged coastline has been measured to have the highest aesthetic value. Researchers at the University of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute developed the method, which uses computational social science to count photos uploaded to an online photo-sharing site.

MADISON -- In the world, there are a lot of small molecules people would like to get rid of, or at least convert to something useful, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison chemist Robert J. Hamers.

Humans have used, sought, and traded gemstones for thousands of years, uniquely linking art, economics, and geology, from the dawn of civilization until now.

In contrast, the theory of plate tectonics, which explains how Earth's crust and upper mantle is divided into independent plates, has only existed for about 50 years. Gemstones mostly form where special conditions of pressure, temperature, and chemical composition occur, and sometimes these conditions can be linked to plate tectonic processes.

The genus Crinivirus includes the whitefly-transmitted members of the family Closteroviridae.

Criniviruses emerged as major agricultural threats at the end of the twentieth century with the establishment and naturalization of their whitefly vectors, members of the genera Trialeurodes and Bemisia, in temperate climates around the globe.

Washington, D.C.—To prevent coral reefs around the world from dying off, deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are required, says a new study from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira. They find that all existing coral reefs will be engulfed in inhospitable ocean chemistry conditions by the end of the century if civilization continues along its current emissions trajectory. Their work will be published July 3 by Environmental Research Letters.

WASHINGTON D.C., June 27, 2013 -- To the ancients, probing the philosophical question of how to distinguish the living from the dead centered on the "mystery of the vital heat." To modern microbiology, this question was always less mysterious than it was annoying -- researchers have known that biological processes should produce thermal signatures, even within single cells, but nobody ever knew how to measure them.

In the late spring, the 4000 elk of the Clarks Fork herd leave crowded winter grounds near Cody, Wyoming, following the greening grass into the highlands of the Absaroka Mountains, where they spend the summer growing fat on vegetation fed by snowmelt. It's a short trip (40-60 kilometers) by migratory standards, and by modern standards, uncommonly free of roads, fences, metropolitan areas, and other human-built barriers. But it crosses an important human boundary: the border into Yellowstone National Park.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Predicted increases in temperature and drought in the coming century may make it more difficult for conifers such as ponderosa pine to regenerate after major forest fires on dry, low-elevation sites, in some cases leading to conversion of forests to grass or shrub lands, a report suggests.

Psittacosaurus, the 'parrot dinosaur' is known from more than 1000 specimens from the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago, of China and other parts of east Asia. As part of his PhD thesis at the University of Bristol, Qi Zhao, now on the staff of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing, carried out the intricate study on bones of babies, juveniles and adults.

WASHINGTON D.C., June 26, 2013 -- A new report by an independent task force commissioned by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), has found that people absorb less radiation from airport X-ray backscatter scanner than they do while standing in line waiting for the scan itself.

WASHINGTON D.C., June 28, 2013 -- The search for thermoelectrics, exotic materials that convert heat directly into electricity, has received a boost from researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo, who have found the best way to identify them.

In the new open-access journal APL Materials, the team shows that a relatively simple technique called the "rigid band approximation" can predict a material's properties more accurately than a competing, more complicated method.

Humans are amazing throwers. We are unique among all animals, including our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, in our ability to throw projectiles at high speeds and with incredible accuracy. This trait was critical to the survival and success of our ancestors, aiding their hunting and protective skills, according to National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded research featured on the cover of this week's journal Nature.

If you want to measure something very precisely, such as slight variations of a length, then you are very likely to use light waves. However, many effects, such as variations of gravity, or surface forces, can only be measured using particles that have a mass. Since, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, massive particles also behave like waves, interferometers can be built in which single atoms or even entire atomic clouds are used instead of light.