Earth

In the quest to harvest light for electronics, the focal point is the moment when photons -- light particles -- encounter electrons, those negatively-charged subatomic particles that form the basis of our modern electronic lives. If conditions are right when electrons and photons meet, an exchange of energy can occur. Maximizing that transfer of energy is the key to making efficient light-captured energetics possible.

Using ultrashort laser pulses an international team at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has managed to manipulate the positions of atoms in hydrocarbon molecules in a targeted fashion.

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)--including ibuprofen, diclofenac, naproxen and others--are commonly used pain medications that are generally safe but may increase the risk of developing stomach and intestinal ulcers.

Every year, about 350 million hectares of land are devastated by fires worldwide, this corresponds to about the size of India. To estimate the resulting damage to human health and economy, precise prognosis of the future development of fires is of crucial importance. Previous studies often considered climate change to be the most important factor. Now, a group of scientists, including researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has found that population development has the same impact at least.

An international team of researchers headed by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute has gained new insights into the carbon dioxide exchange between ocean and atmosphere, thus making a significant contribution to solving one of the great scientific mysteries of the ice ages. In the past 800,000 years of climate history, the transitions from interglacials and ice ages were always accompanied by a significant reduction in the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. It then fell from 280 to 180 ppm (parts per million).

When tiny microbes jam up like fans exiting a baseball stadium, they can do some real damage.

University of California, Berkeley, physicists found this out the hard way when the baker's yeast cells (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) they were studying multiplied so prolifically that they burst the tiny chamber in which they were being raised.

CLEMSON, South Carolina -- One of the most effective methods for capturing carbon from the atmosphere in the tropics of Latin America requires doing very little. In fact, researchers say, just protecting natural forest regrowth can help reduce climate change.

Carbon uptake by secondary tropical forests is substantial.

The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will participate in a new National Microbiome Initiative launched today by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

UPTON, NY--For years, scientists have been trying to emulate photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae, and some bacteria harness light from the sun to chemically transform water and carbon dioxide into energy that is stored for later use. An artificial version of photosynthesis could provide a clean, renewable source of energy to help satisfy society's growing demands.

Red knots migrate between their breeding grounds in the Arctic and their wintering grounds in West Africa. Chicks currently born under rapidly warming conditions attain smaller sizes before migration starts, because they miss the insect peak. If they reach their wintering grounds in the tropics, they are faced with a second disadvantage: their shorter bills cannot reach their favourite shellfish food. This results in an evolutionary force towards smaller-sized birds with large bills.

With some movies, suspense is quite literally in the air. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, analysed the air in movie theatres during various movie screenings and determined that every movie leaves a characteristic pattern in the air.

Flick a switch on a dark winter day and your office is flooded with bright light, one of many everyday miracles to which we are all usually oblivious.

A physicist would probably describe what is happening in terms of the particle nature of light. An atom or molecule in the fluorescent tube that is in an excited state spontaneously decays to a lower energy state, releasing a particle called a photon. When the photon enters your eye, something similar happens but in reverse. The photon is absorbed by a molecule in the retina and its energy kicks that molecule into an excited state.

Scientists working for the Wildlife Conservation Society, the University of Stirling, and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants say that the high levels of poaching forest elephants will result in a loss of the oldest, wisest matriarchs, who are living libraries of their vast rainforest domain. The oldest females guide and teach their young where to go for food and minerals, what to eat, how to process tricky foods, and how to avoid danger. Without these mothers, forest elephant social lives and their understanding of their ecosystem will be lost.

Physicists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the University of Basel have succeeded in measuring the very weak van der Waals forces between individual atoms for the first time. To do this, they fixed individual noble gas atoms within a molecular network and determined the interactions with a single xenon atom that they had positioned at the tip of an atomic force microscope. As expected, the forces varied according to the distance between the two atoms; but, in some cases, the forces were several times larger than theoretically calculated.

The physical mechanism causing the unique, sharp bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain has been uncovered in a collaboration between the University of Sydney and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).