Earth

Reptiles rapidly invaded the seas soon after a global extinction wiped out most life on Earth, according to a new study led by University of California, Davis, researchers.

Global climate change -- likely triggered by massive volcanic eruptions -- killed off more than 95 percent of all species about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. Land reptiles colonized the ocean in just 3.35 million years at the beginning of the Triassic, a speedy recovery in geologic time, the researchers report today (June 13) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Chemically the same, graphite and diamonds are as physically distinct as two minerals can be, one opaque and soft, the other translucent and hard. What makes them unique is their differing arrangement of carbon atoms.

The human-caused rise in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is being given an extra boost this year by the natural climate phenomena of El Niño, say climate scientists in a paper published in today's edition of the journal Nature Climate Change. As a result, 2016 will be the first year with concentrations above 400 parts per million all year round in the iconic Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 13, 2016--In the 2015 movie "The Martian," stranded astronaut Matt Damon turns to the chemistry of rocket fuel, hydrazine and hydrogen, to create lifesaving water and nearly blows himself up. But if you turn the process around and get the hydrazine to help, you create hydrogen from water by changing conductivity in a semiconductor, a transformation with wide potential applications in energy and electronics.

This is part 17 in a series on NSF's geosciences risk and resilience interest area. Please see parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16.

In 50 years, summers across most of the globe could be hotter than any summer experienced by people to date, according to a study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

Carbon dioxide emissions from dry and oxygen-rich environments will likely strengthen the climate forcing impact of thawing permafrost on top of methane release from oxygen-poor wetlands in the Arctic, according to a study in Nature Climate Change led by Northern Arizona University assistant research professor Christina Schädel.

Sometimes it is the tiny things in the world that can make an incredible difference. One of these things is the nanoparticle. Nanoparticles may be small, but they have a variety of important applications in areas such as, medicine, manufacturing, and energy. A team of researchers from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) recently discovered a unique copper-silver nanoparticle structure that has a core of one element surrounded by a "cage" of the other element.

Carbon dioxide emissions from dry and oxygen-rich environments are likely to play a much greater role in controlling future rates of climate change caused by permafrost thaw than rates of methane release from oxygen-poor wetlands in the Arctic, according to research by a scientist at the University of Exeter.

The Gorkha earthquake struck Nepal on April 25, 2015. It's a part of the world that is prone to earthquakes, as the Indian plate makes its incremental, sticky descent beneath the Eurasian plate. The magnitude 7.8 jolt, which was very shallow (only 15 km underground), caused a tremendous amount of damage in Kathmandu. But it didn't rupture the Earth's surface, signifying that only part of the fault had slipped, below-ground.

Researchers at Tohoku University have realized wafer-scale and high yield synthesis of suspended graphene nanoribbons. The unique growth dynamic has been elucidated through comparing experiments, molecular dynamics simulations and theoretical calculations made with researchers from the University of Tokyo and Hokkaido University.

Scientists of Helmholtz Zentrum München have now discovered that Arabidopsis thaliana plants can fix atmospheric nitric oxide with the aid of plant hemoglobin proteins. Using this previously unknown mechanism, these plants can contribute to the improvement of air quality. The results of the research have now been published in the journal Plant, Cell & Environment.

How must a landscape be utilized in order to fulfil both ecological and socio-economical requirements? This question has been answered by an international research team with the participation of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), using abandoned pasturage in the Ecuadorean mountain rainforests. By means of simulations, the scientists ascertained that the key to this is multitasking, which is to say the most diverse utilization possible. The results have now been published in Nature Communications.

Scientists forecast that this year's Gulf of Mexico dead zone--an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and marine life - will be approximately 5,898 square miles or about the size of Connecticut, the same range as it has averaged over the last several years.

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico affects nationally important commercial and recreational fisheries. Hypoxic zones or "dead zones" are caused by high levels of nutrients, primarily from activities such as industrialized agriculture and inadequate wastewater treatment.

The frequency of nuisance tidal flooding in many U.S. cities increased as predicted for the 2015 meteorological year, from May 2015 to April 2016, according to a new NOAA report.

In some cities, the days of nuisance flooding exceeded trends and broke records, especially in the southeastern U.S and Gulf Coast, which may be due to a strong El Niño compounding already rising sea levels.

Hotel managers and materials scientists have a lot in common--they both need to find a way to control properties by managing vacancies.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory found they could use a small electric current to introduce oxygen voids, or vacancies, that dramatically change the conductivity of thin oxide films. The results are published today in Nature Communications.

The discovery improves our understanding of how these materials work and could be useful for new electronics, catalysts or more.