Earth

College Park, MD. - Extreme heat and heavy rainfall are related to increased risk of hospitalization for asthma in Maryland, according to a study by University of Maryland School of Public Health researchers.

Based on over a decade of asthma hospitalization data (115,923 cases from 2000-2012), researchers observed higher risk of asthma hospitalization after extreme heat or extreme precipitation events. The increases in risk were particularly high during summer months. Their findings are published in the journal Environmental Health.

In just 30 seconds, a devastating earthquake like the ones that struck Japan and Ecuador can render a city helpless. With roadways split and bridges severely damaged, residents and emergency personnel could be prevented from moving around to rebuild.

The April issue of Springer's Journal of Maritime Archaeology (JMA) focuses on a single shipwreck as the lens through which maritime archaeology assesses the advent of the Atomic Age and the Cold War. The wreck is the World War II veteran aircraft carrier USS Independence, which was one of nearly a hundred ships used as targets in the first tests of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946.

A new study examining carbon exchange in the Amazon rainforest following extremely hot and dry spells reveals tropical ecosystems might be more sensitive to climate change than previously thought.

The findings, published online on April 28 in the journal Global Change Biology, have implications for the fate of the Amazon and other tropical ecosystems if greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb.

Nearly 10 billion years ago in a galaxy known as PKS B1424-418, a dramatic explosion occurred. Light from this blast began arriving at Earth in 2012. Now, an international team of astronomers, led by Prof. Matthias Kadler, professor for astrophysics at the university of Würzburg, and including other scientists from the new research cluster for astronomy and astroparticle physics at the universities of Würzburg and Erlangen-Nürnberg, have shown that a record-breaking neutrino seen around the same time likely was born in the same event. The results are published in Nature Physics.

Beauty companies should focus on older women's desire to look good, not young.

Companies promoting beauty products should reconsider current methods when targeting older women as few claim to use cosmetic products to look younger. The majority say they use them to look good and feel confident.

This is one of the findings of a study by Dr Carolyn Mair and Soljana Cili, from the London College of Fashion, who will present their research this week at the British Psychological Society's 2016 Annual Conference in Nottingham.

Let's say you're trying to pinpoint when a particular past event occurred, but your best possible estimate puts it only within a span of 10,000 years. Now imagine if something could shrink that window of "when" to just 30 years.

That's the power of a new mathematical tool devised and tested by an international team of scientists, led by two from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The tool, a machine-learning algorithm honed by Abbas Ourmazd and Russell Fung, reduces timing uncertainties during changing events, improving accuracy by a factor of up to 300.

All light sources work by absorbing energy - for example, from an electric current - and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat. Superfast light sources can be used, for example, in laser lights, LED lights and in single-photon light sources for quantum technology. New research results from the Niels Bohr Institute show that light sources can be made much faster by using a principle that was predicted theoretically in 1954.

A new study found that vulnerability of deep-sea biodiversity to climate change's triple threat - rising water temperatures, and decreased oxygen, and pH levels - is not uniform across the world's oceans.

The analysis by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego used responses to natural variation in temperature, oxygen, and pH to reveal that deep-sea biodiversity from Baja California to San Francisco may be highly susceptible to projected climate changes in the future.

The world faces unprecedented environmental transformation. Successfully managing and adapting to a rapidly changing Earth requires the swift action of well-informed policymakers. In a State of the Science report for BioScience, Audrey L. Mayer of Michigan Technological University and her colleagues argue for a major role for landscape ecology in tackling the urgent global issues of climate change, land use-land cover change, and urbanization.

Science can flourish when experts disagree, but in the governmental realm uncertainty can lead to inadequate policy and preparedness. When it comes to climate change, it can be OK for computational models to differ on what future sea levels will be. The same flexibility does not exist for determining the height of a seawall needed to protect people from devastating floods.

BOULDER -- A reduction in the amount of oxygen dissolved in the oceans due to climate change is already discernible in some parts of the world and should be evident across large regions of the oceans between 2030 and 2040, according to a new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Rainwater may play an important role in the process that triggers earthquakes, according to new research.

Researchers from the University of Southampton, GNS Science (New Zealand), the University of Otago, and GFZ Potsdam (Germany), identified the sources and fluxes of the geothermal fluids and mineral veins from the Southern Alps of New Zealand where the Pacific and Australian Plates collide along the Alpine Fault.

Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, has unveiled its annual ranking of the top 25 analytical and life sciences instrumentation companies of 2015. The rankings, based on sales, remained largely unchanged from the previous year. Thermo Fisher Scientific took the top spot with $4.24 billion in instrumentation sales.

Thermally-based industrial chemical separation processes such as distillation now account for 10 to 15 percent of the world's annual energy use. Slaking the global thirst for energy could therefore get a substantial boost from improved technologies for producing fuels, plastics, food and other products with reduced inputs of energy.