Earth

More time in front of the TV set and higher exposure to TV adverts may lead to increased consumption of sweetened beverages among children. This is the conclusion of a new study from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

The parents of more than 1,700 two- to four-year-olds in Sweden responded to questions about their children's TV and screen habits and consumption of sweetened drinks.

Some research has shown that the effects of changes in the climate may be weak or even non-existent. This makes it easy to conclude that climate change will ultimately have less impact than previous warnings have predicted. But it could also be explained as direct and indirect effects cancelling each other out, as scientists from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, show in a paper recently published in PNAS, the esteemed US scientific journal.

To investigate how different climate impacts interact, an experiment was conducted at Kristineberg Marine Research Station.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – As ice sheets melted during the deglaciation of the last ice age and global oceans warmed, oceanic oxygen levels decreased and "denitrification" accelerated by 30 to 120 percent, a new international study shows, creating oxygen-poor marine regions and throwing the oceanic nitrogen cycle off balance.

A major question in ecology has centered on the role of microbes in regulating ecosystem function. Now, in research published ahead of print in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Brajesh Singh of the University of Western Sydney, Australia, and collaborators show how changes in the populations of methanotrophic bacteria can have consequences for methane mitigation at ecosystem levels.

"Ecological theories developed for macro-ecology can explain the microbial regulation of the methane cycle," says Singh.

Using the sensitive ears of a parasitic fly for inspiration, a group of researchers has created a new type of microphone that achieves better acoustical performance than what is currently available in hearing aids. The scientists will present their results at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics, held June 2-7 in Montreal.

The ocean is naturally filled with the sounds of breaking waves, cracking ice, driving rain, and marine animal calls, but more and more, human activity is adding to the noise. Ships' propellers create low-frequency hums that can travel hundreds of kilometers or more in the deep ocean. Scientists have now modeled this shipping noise on a global scale. The world-wide maps will be presented for the first time at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal.

During command and control operations, military personnel are frequently exposed to extreme auditory overload – essentially bombarded by multiple messages coming from radio networks, loudspeakers, and live voices in an environment also filled with high-level noise from weapons and vehicles.

Of all the bugs that achieve the mantle of summer pest, cicadas are perhaps the most curious. They don't sting, they don't bite, they don't buzz around your head, they taste good in chocolate, but as the drowning din of the 17-year brood this summer will remind: we would love them less if they emerged more often.

Cicadas are unique among insects in their ability to emit loud and annoying sounds. So why would anyone actually want to replicate theses sounds?

New York, NY—May 31, 2013—In a new study, published in Science May 31, 2013, Columbia Engineering researchers demonstrate that graphene, even if stitched together from many small crystalline grains, is almost as strong as graphene in its perfect crystalline form. This work resolves a contradiction between theoretical simulations, which predicted that grain boundaries can be strong, and earlier experiments, which indicated that they were much weaker than the perfect lattice.

Researchers have determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV capsid, a protein shell that protects the virus's genetic material and is a key to its ability to infect and debilitate the human body's defense mechanism. Detailed simulations were achieved with the use of a supercomputer on a 64 million atom sample. The capsid has become an attractive target for the development of new antiretroviral drugs that suppress the HIV virus and stop the progression of AIDS.

Taking an image of an individual molecule while it undergoes a chemical reaction has been deemed one of the holy grails of chemistry. Scientists at the University of Berkeley and the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) have managed, for the very first time, to take direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules just before and immediately after a complex organic reaction. The images enable appreciating the processes of the rupture and creation of links between the atoms making up a molecule.

A physical particle postulated 80 years ago could provide a decisive step toward the realization of novel, highly efficient data storage devices. Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), the Technische Universitaet Dresden and the University of Cologne found that with magnetic monopoles in magnetic vortices, called skyrmions, information can be written and erased.

WASHINGTON—Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide "fertilization effect" has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.

Structural biologists from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have captured the first three-dimensional crystalline snapshot of a critical but fleeting process that takes place thousands of times per second in each human cell. The research appears online today in the journal Cell Reports and could prove useful in the study of cancer and other diseases.

When Felix Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to develop nanostructures made of graphene using a new, controlled approach to chemical reactions, the first result was a surprise: spectacular images of individual carbon atoms and the bonds between them.