Earth

Alexandria, VA - As skiers hit the slopes this winter, EARTH Magazine explores the science of how to keep them and other winter explorers safe. Every year, hundreds of people are killed by avalanches. Understanding the science of the frozen environment is only part of this story; communicating the risk is a field as dynamic as the weather systems and terrains that foster avalanches.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Reducing U.S. climate emissions enough to avoid a 2-degree Celsius increase in global warming could prevent up to 175,000 pollution-related premature deaths nationwide by 2030 and generate health benefits of about $250 billion annually, according to a new analysis by researchers at Duke University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

When acidic materials are spilled, the clean-up procedure involves adding a base chemical to neutralize the acid. Up to a point, the more base added, the more neutral and less toxic the spill becomes.

A team of physicists including Russian researchers succeeded in conducting an experiment in which, for the first time in history, control over ultrafast motion of electrons down to three attoseconds (one attosecond refers to a second as one second refers to the lifetime of the Universe) was proved possible. This fact paves a way to new directions of research that seemed improbable before. The experiment was conducted with the help of the free-electron laser FERMI located at the "Elettra Sincrotrone" research center in Trieste, Italy.

MONTREAL, February 22, 2016 - As the Trudeau government prepares for its early March First Ministers Meetings on climate change, researchers from the University of Montreal, University of California Santa Barbara, Utah State University and Yale University have just released a new interactive tool to visualize, with unprecedented detail, the geographic distribution of climate opinions across Canada. It allows users to download the underlying estimates of public opinion for each province and riding in Canada.

What's it about?

A universal theory on single molecules was drawn upon experimental facts by forming the concept of "The Meaningful Time Tm" acting as a fundamental natural law of single-molecule time resultion of freely diffusing molecules in dilute liquid and live cells (3D normal and anomalous diffusion) as well as in artificial or biological membranes (2D normal and anomalous diffusion). The physical law corresponds to the novel mathematical equations which we use to describe every single molecule.

Quantum physicist Mario Krenn and his colleagues in the group of Anton Zeilinger from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have developed an algorithm which designs new useful quantum experiments. As the computer does not rely on human intuition, it finds novel unfamiliar solutions. The research has just been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Key Research Results

1.Successful observation of ultrafast atomic rearrangements on picosecond timescales in a thin film of the DVD phase-change recording material Ge-Sb-Te.

2.Ultra-short x-ray pulses from the free electron laser were used to observe sub-nanometer scale changes on sub-picosecond time-scales.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2016 -- Ninety-nine percent of adults who wear contacts admit to breaking some cardinal lens rules: sleeping in them, washing them in water and so on. Many contact-wearers may brush off these accidents, but improper lens care can have gross -- and sometimes serious --consequences. This week, Reactions collaborates with Anna Rothschild from Gross Science to explain why contacts can cause problems and how to prevent them. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/9fzQBNH5Cp4.

Powerful Tropical Cyclone Winston continued to intensify as it neared Fiji and NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of the strengthening storm with a clear eye. Warnings are posted in Fiji as the storm is expected to make landfall there as a major hurricane.

While a classical bit found in conventional electronics exists only in binary 1 or 0 states, the more resourceful quantum bit, or 'qubit' is represented by a vector, pointing to a simultaneous combination of the 1 and 0 states. To fully implement a qubit, it is necessary to control the direction of this qubit's vector, which is generally done using fine-tuned and noise-isolated procedures.

New research published in Scientific Reports in February indicates that a warm ocean surface water prevailed during the last ice age, sandwiched between two major ice sheets just south of Greenland.

Alexandria, VA - Tsunami hazard maps exist for California coastlines, but recent geological studies indicated some faults may be capable of unleashing more powerful quakes than previously thought. Given this new information, researchers at the University of California Riverside wondered if the current tsunami hazard maps adequately predict inundation zones, or if they need to be updated.

There's no question that our species has had a dramatic impact on the planet's physical environment, particularly over the last few centuries, with the rise of modern industry, transportation, and infrastructure. But as new research shows, humans have been transforming the landscape, with lasting impacts, since long before the start of the Industrial Era.

HANOVER, N.H. - Global climate models are essential for climate prediction and assessing the impacts of climate change across large areas, but a Dartmouth College-led team has developed a new method to project future climate scenarios at the local level.

The method can be used in any mountainous or hilly area with a reasonable number of weather stations measuring temperature and precipitation.