Earth

Preterm infants appear to mature better if they are shielded from most wavelengths of visible light, from violet to orange. But it has been a challenge to develop a controllable light filter for preterm incubators that can switch between blocking out all light--for sleeping--and all but red light to allows medical staff and parents to check up on the kids when they're awake.

Accurately sensing rotation is important to a variety of technologies, from today's smartphones to navigational instruments that help keep submarines, planes, and satellites on course. In a paper accepted for publication in the American Institute of Physics' journal Review of Scientific Instruments, researchers from the Technical University of Munich and New Zealand's University of Canterbury discuss what are called "large ring laser gyroscopes" that are six orders of magnitude more sensitive than gyroscopes commercially available.

New York, NY—May 3, 2013—Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a technique to isolate a single water molecule inside a buckyball, or C60, and to drive motion of the so-called "big" nonpolar ball through the encapsulated "small" polar H2O molecule, a controlling transport mechanism in a nanochannel under an external electric field.

It's difficult to imagine how a degree or two of warming will affect a location. Will it rain less? What will happen to the area's vegetation?

New Berkeley Lab research offers a way to envision a warmer future. It maps how Earth's myriad climates—and the ecosystems that depend on them—will move from one area to another as global temperatures rise.

News of a hurricane threat sends our hearts racing, glues us to the Internet for updates, and makes us rush to the store to stock up on staples. Hawaii, fortunately, has been largely free from these violent storms in the recent past, only two having made landfall in more than 30 years.

Improving our understanding of the human brain, gathering insights into the origin of our universe through the detection of gravitational waves, or optimizing the precision of GPS systems- all are difficult challenges to master because they require the ability to visualize highly fragile elements, which can be terminally damaged by any attempt to observe them. Now, quantum physics has provided a solution.

Similarly to the way a river, flowing across Earth's surface, influences sediment transport and shaping of the landscape, so coastal winds, flowing over dunes, affect how the dune shapes evolve and how sand is transported along the coast.

Wind flow over dunes has been extensively studied, but in most cases studies have been two-dimensional and focused on straight dunes with smooth slopes and no vegetation or other features that might affect how airflow separates at the crest of the dune.

African camels and rodents migrated to Iberia, and European rabbits and rats migrated to North Africa at the same time before isolation of the Mediterranean Sea during the Messinian.

A new date of 6.23 million years ago for the Venta del Moro fossil site (Spain) can be regarded as the first appearance datum for the African migrants Paraethomys and Paracamelus in Europe.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 3, 2013 – The 2011 Tohoku earthquake is the best recorded and most studied giant earthquake, resulting in a remarkable suite of observations. A special issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) captures the latest progress in understanding what happened when this massive M >9 earthquake struck offshore of Japan and produced a devastating tsunami that claimed almost 20,000 lives and precipitated the world's second worst nuclear power plant disaster.

A NASA-led modeling study provides new evidence that global warming may increase the risk for extreme rainfall and drought.

The study shows for the first time how rising carbon dioxide concentrations could affect the entire range of rainfall types on Earth.

L.C. Skinner et al., Godwin Laboratory for Palaeoclimate Research, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK. Posted online ahead of print on 29 April 2013; DOI: 10.1130/G34133.1.

Evidence has emerged confirming a key role for Antarctic regional climate changes in regulating atmospheric CO2 on millennial time-scales.

Scientists from the Smithsonian and the University of Rhode Island have found unsuspected linkages between the oxidation state of iron in volcanic rocks and variations in the chemistry of the deep Earth. Not only do the trends run counter to predictions from recent decades of study, they belie a role for carbon circulating in the deep Earth. The team's research was published May 2 in Science Express.

University of Manchester and National University of Singapore researchers have shown how building multi-layered heterostructures in a three-dimensional stack can produce an exciting physical phenomenon exploring new electronic devices.

The breakthrough, published in Science, could lead to electric energy that runs entire buildings generated by sunlight absorbed by its exposed walls; the energy can be used at will to change the transparency and reflectivity of fixtures and windows depending on environmental conditions, such as temperature and brightness.

A multimillion dollar University of Colorado Boulder instrument package to study space weather has passed its pre-installation testing and is ready to be incorporated onto a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite for a 2015 launch.

The body's brown fat cells play a key role in the development of obesity and diabetes. Researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have now discovered that we humans have two different kinds of brown fat cells and not one kind as previously thought. This discovery, now published in Nature Medicine, opens up new opportunities for future medicines that exploit the brown fat cells' ability to consume calories.