Earth

Tropical cyclones in the Philippines are becoming more extreme and causing greater amounts of devastation, a new study has shown.

Geographers from the University of Sheffield have analysed annual data over the period from 1951 to 2013 and saw a slightly decreasing trend in the number of smaller cyclones (above 118 kilometres per hour) that hit land in the Philippines, particularly in the last two decades.

Damages from extreme events like floods are even more relevant than the mean sea level itself when it comes to the costs of climate impacts for coastal regions. However, while it is now rather well understood how sea-levels will rise in the future, only small progress has been made estimating how the implied damage for cities at the coasts will increase during the next decades. A team of scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) now provides a method to quantify monetary losses from coastal floods under sea-level rise.

Feb. 25, 2016 - Boulder, Colo., USA - On Nov. 20, 2013, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force discovered a small islet near Nishinoshima volcano, Ogasawara Islands, Japan. The exact date of the initial eruption that spawned the islet is unknown, but a thermal anomaly was detected in the area in early November 2013. Fukashi Maeno and colleagues are investigating the creation of this islet, which on the day of its discovery was about 150 by 80 meters in size.

First the nucleus, then the shell: Researchers from Marburg and Karlsruhe have studied stepwise formation of metal clusters, smallest fractions of metals in molecular form. The shell gradually forms around the inner atom rather than by later inclusion of the central atom. Knowledge of all development steps may allow for customized optoelectronic and magnetic properties, as is reported by the researchers in the science journal Nature Communications. (DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS10480)

How much do consumers care about the carbon footprint of the products they buy? Would they care more if the goods were labeled with emissions data? Does it matter at which stage in the lifecycle of a product the carbon is emitted? Research published in the International Journal of Environmental Policy and Decision Making offers a way to find out.

Hydrogen peroxide is one of the most common and versatile of household products. In dilute form, it can disinfect wounds and bleach hair, whiten teeth and remove stains from clothing, clean contact lenses and kill mold and algae.

In high concentrations, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) can be catalytically decomposed into oxygen and steam and used as a propellant or as an explosive itself.

Hydrogen peroxide is typically made in a multi-step, energy-intensive process that requires it to be produced in large quantities and shipped and stored in a highly concentrated form.

Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. In the Amazon, the opposite is true: without truly seeing the trees, you can't "see" the forest and understand the seasonal patterns of photosynthesis that play a major role in ecosystem and climate models, according to new research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

A new study provides one of the first quantitative estimates of the methane leak rate from the blowout of a well in California in 2015, suggesting that methane emissions from this event temporarily doubled those from all other sources in the entire Los Angeles Basin combined. Globally, underground natural gas storage facilities hold reserves representing 10% of the world's annual gas consumption. On October 23, 2015, the blowout of a well connected to the Aliso Canyon underground storage facility outside Los Angeles - the fourth largest facility of its kind in the U.S.

Leaf quality, rather than leaf abundance, drives seasonal fluxes of carbon dioxide in tropical regions, a new study reveals. These findings may help explain why previous observations of forest carbon cycles have been so disparate. To date, models of seasonal forest-atmosphere interactions in tropical regions have assumed that lower precipitation means less water for plants and thus less photosynthesis and carbon uptake. However, by monitoring the photosynthesis capacity of plants across four sites in the Amazon, Jin Wu et al.

Graphene, a modified form of carbon, offers versatile potential for use in coating machine components and in the field of electronic switches. An international team of researchers led by physicists at the University of Basel have been studying the lubricity of this material on the nanometer scale. Since it produces almost no friction at all, it could drastically reduce energy loss in machines when used as a coating, as the researchers report in the journal Science.

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Research led by scientists from the University of Arizona and the National Institute for Amazon Research in Brazil has discovered the reason for a discrepancy between large seasonal changes in photosynthesis in the Amazon forest.

The once Category 5 Tropical Cyclone Winston was winding down when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over it early on Feb. 25 is it continued weakening in the South Pacific. Now sub-tropical, Winston was threatening Australia's Norfolk Island with tropical-storm-force winds.

PITTSBURGH (Feb. 25, 2016) ... Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering, along with collaborators at Penn State University's Chemistry Department, have discovered a novel way of utilizing the chemical reactions of certain enzymes to trigger self-powered mechanical movement.

HOUSTON -- (Feb. 25, 2016) -- An international team of scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Rice University and other institutions has performed the first experiment to manipulate seawater chemistry in a natural coral-reef community to determine the effect that excess carbon dioxide released by human activity is having on coral reefs.

Marbled murrelets are so secretive that biologists didn't even know where they nested until the 1970s, and monitoring the populations of these endangered seabirds remains a challenge. A new study, however, suggests that autonomous acoustic sensors used to detect and record murrelet calls could offer a viable alternative to surveys conducted by field biologists.