Earth

Homing pigeons are usually remarkably efficient navigators, however, on rare occasions, things go drastically wrong. So, when Jon Hagstrum of the US Geological Survey read in his local newspaper about two races when pigeons had been lost in 1998, he was reminded of a lecture by Bill Keeton that he had heard years before as an undergraduate at Cornell University. Keeton had been studying how birds successfully navigated from distant and unfamiliar release sites. However, the birds almost always had problems selecting the correct bearing home when released from three local sites.

A powerful cold front moving from the central United States to the East Coast is wiping out spring-like temperatures and replacing them with winter-time temperatures with powerful storms in between. An image released from NASA using data from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provides a stunning look at the powerful system that brings a return to winter weather in its wake.

False-colored night-time satellite imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite clearly shows bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the eye of Cyclone Felleng as it parallels the coast of eastern Madagascar.

Two Rutgers physics professors have proposed an explanation for a new type of order, or symmetry, in an exotic material made with uranium – a theory that may one day lead to enhanced computer displays and data storage systems and more powerful superconducting magnets for medical imaging and levitating high-speed trains.

Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the February 2013 issue of GSA Today, Sean Gallen and his colleagues from the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University take a new look at the origin of the Miocene rejuvenation of topographic relief in the southern Appalachians.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have created, for the first time, a new type of microchip which allows information to travel in three dimensions. Currently, microchips can only pass digital information in a very limited way - from either left to right or front to back. The research was published today, 31 January, in Nature.

Dr Reinoud Lavrijsen, an author on the paper from the University of Cambridge, said: "Today's chips are like bungalows – everything happens on the same floor. We've created the stairways allowing information to pass between floors."

Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as Clovis, in North America 13,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Ecology is rife with predation, competition, and other dramatic "negative interactions," but those alone do not determine the course life on Earth. Organisms sometimes benefit each other, too, and according to the Stress Gradient Hypothesis, their "positive interactions" become measurably more influential when ecosystems become threatened by conditions such as drought.

Earth is (mostly) flat: Apportionment of the flux of continental sediment over millennial time scalesJane K. Willenbring et al., Dept. of Earth and Environmental Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA, and National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics, 2 Third Ave. SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55414, USA. Posted online 4 Jan. 2013; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G33918.1.

Searching for common elements in seemingly incompatible scientific theories may lead to the discovery of new ones that revolutionize our understanding of the world.

PHILADELPHIA — Wear is a fact of life. As surfaces rub against one another, they break down and lose their original shape. With less material to start with and functionality that often depends critically on shape and surface structure, wear affects nanoscale objects more strongly than it does their macroscale counterparts.

Mention mobile applications, or mobile apps, and people think of games, email, news, weather, productivity and other software for Apple, Android and other smart phones and tablet computers. But an app with broader impact — the first mobile application to foster wider use of the environmentally friendly and sustainable principles of green chemistry — is the topic of a report in the American Chemical Society's new journal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as Clovis, in North America 13,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series.

Forestry and nature conservation can benefit from promoting more different varieties of trees, according to a new study in which researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, were involved.

Modern forestry is based largely on monocultures – usually pine or spruce trees in Sweden – mainly because this is seen to be more rational. However, a forest also contributes ecosystem services other than just wood production, such as biological diversity, carbon sequestration and berries.

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