Earth

NEW ORLEANS, April 8, 2013 — With global climate change and the prospect of another record-hot summer on the minds of millions of people, experts have gathered here today to encourage scientists to take a more active role in communicating the topic to the public, policy makers and others. The symposium, "Understanding Climate Science: A Scientist's Responsibility," is part of the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

A new study has found that pollution from fine particles in the air – mainly the result of burning coal or volcanic eruptions – can shade corals from sunlight and cool the surrounding water resulting in reduced growth rates.

NEW ORLEANS, April 7, 2013 — The American Chemical Society (ACS) today announced awarding the first grants in a new initiative intended to increase understanding of the science underpinning global climate change among thousands of people around the country.

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Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii experienced its first summit eruption in 26 years when a new vent along the east wall of Halema`uma`u Crater opened in March 2008.

HOUSTON -- (April 5, 2013) -- Rice University physicists on the hunt for theorigins of high-temperature superconductivity have published new findingsthis week about a seemingly contradictory state in which a materialsimultaneously exhibits the conflicting characteristics of both a metallicconductor and an insulator.

HOUSTON -- (April 5, 2013) -- Rice University physicists on the hunt for the origins of high-temperature superconductivity have published new findings this week about a material that becomes "schizophrenic" -- simultaneously exhibiting the characteristics of both a metallic conductor and an insulator.

Osmosis – the flow of a solvent across a semipermeable membrane from a region of lower to higher solute concentration – is a well-developed concept in physics and biophysics. The problem is that, even though the concept is important to plant and human physiology, osmosis is understood in biology and chemistry in a much simpler – and often incorrect – way.

Gordon, the unique supercomputer launched last year by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, recently completed its most data-intensive task so far: rapidly processing raw data from almost one billion particle collisions as part of a project to help define the future research agenda for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

LA JOLLA, CA – April 4, 2013 – Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have illuminated the mechanism at the heart of one of the most useful processes in modern chemistry. A reaction that is robust and easy to perform, it is widely employed to synthesize new pharmaceuticals, biological probes, new materials and other products. But precisely how it works had been unclear since its invention at TSRI more than a decade ago.

A custom-built programmable 3D printer can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues, Oxford University scientists have demonstrated.

The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies.

Obesity is linked to the widespread epidemics of diabetes and heart disease that plague society, but a lesser-known fact is that the weight can also lead to autoimmune disease. Now, researchers have new information about how that damaging immune response happens and how it might be stopped, published on April 4 in Cell Reports, a Cell Press publication.

The key, they show, may be to block an important element known as AIM (for apoptosis inhibitor of macrophage) in the bloodstream and, ultimately, the production of antibodies that attack the self.

In a geological moment about 66 million years ago, something killed off almost all the dinosaurs and some 70 percent of all other species living on Earth. Only those dinosaurs related to birds appear to have survived. Most scientists agree that the culprit in this extinction was extraterrestrial, and the prevailing opinion has been that the party crasher was an asteroid.

Owing to the huge array of applications, catalysis has long been dubbed as one of the most significant areas of process and synthetic chemistry. In fact, the vast majority of all chemical industrial products – be it in the field of pharmaceutical, agricultural or polymer chemistry – involve catalysts at some stage of the manufacturing process.

Talk about storing data in the cloud.

Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have taken this to a whole new level by demonstrating* that they can store visual images within quite an ethereal memory device—a thin vapor of rubidium atoms. The effort may prove helpful in creating memory for quantum computers.