Earth

In 2 articles published this week in PLOS Medicine, Saskia van der Kam of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and colleagues describe the outcomes of two randomised controlled trials in resource-limited settings to determine if the vicious cycle between childhood illness and malnutrition could be broken with a brief period of food supplementation during recovery from illness.

Washington, DC--Columbia Theological Seminary's William Brown, the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament, will present a paper at the AAAS 2016 Annual Meeting on "Theological Reasons for Protecting Biodiversity." The talk will be presented on Saturday, February 13, 2016 at 10:00 AM-11:30 AM at the Marriott Wardman Park. Prof. Brown will present how Columbia Seminary is cultivating a love for biodiversity among religious leaders through the help of the AAAS "Science for Seminaries" program.

Seismologists studying a massive crack in the ground that appeared north of Menominee, Michigan in 2010 now think they know what the unusual feature might be. But as they explain in their study published this week in the journal Seismological Research Letters, there are still some mysteries to clear up about the strange geological occurrence in the rural Michigan woods.

Chicago homeowners, take note: you'll get a better return on your investment if you buy a lottery ticket when the jackpot is high, rather than pay to secure your water heater against earthquake damage.

That's the conclusion of a Northwestern University class of geosciences and civil engineering students who decided to estimate these costs and benefits after an Illinois Emergency Management Agency spokesperson urged Illinois residents to protect their water heaters against earthquakes.

Superconductors have long been confined to niche applications, due to the fact that the highest temperature at which even the best of these materials becomes resistance-free is minus 70 degrees Celsius. Nowadays they are mainly used in magnets for nuclear magnetic resonance tomographs, fusion devices and particle accelerators. Physicists from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) in Hamburg shone laser pulses at a material made up from potassium atoms and carbon atoms arranged in bucky ball structures.

A new study co-authored by an MIT professor shows that China's new efforts to price carbon could lower the country's carbon dioxide emissions significantly without impeding economic development over the next three decades.

Researchers have recreated the universe's primordial soup in miniature format by colliding lead atoms with extremely high energy in the 27 km long particle accelerator, the LHC at CERN in Geneva. The primordial soup is a so-called quark-gluon plasma and researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have measured its liquid properties with great accuracy at the LHC's top energy. The results have been submitted to Physical Review Letters, which is the top scientific journal for nuclear and particle physics.

Boulder, Colo., USA - Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) is a powerful mapping tool that helps us to image natural surfaces at centimeter scale, which is established in this research study by evaluating the performance of long-range TLS, Riegl Z620i and Riegl LPM-800HA, on characterizing natural surfaces. Prabin Shilpakar and colleagues have developed a procedure to test componential uncertainty budgets of the TLS system, such as instrumental error, georeferencing error, and surface modeling error.

Polymers that visibly change shape when exposed to temperature changes are nothing new. But a research team led by Chemical Engineering Professor Mitch Anthamatten at the University of Rochester created a material that undergoes a shape change that can be triggered by body heat alone, opening the door for new medical and other applications.

The material developed by Anthamatten and graduate student Yuan Meng is a type of shape-memory polymer, which can be programmed to retain a temporary shape until it is triggered--typically by heat--to return to its original shape.

Washington, DC--If you freeze any liquid fast enough, even liquid metal, it becomes a glass. Vitrified metals, or metallic glasses, are at the frontier of materials science research. They have been made by rapidly cooling alloys of various metals including, zirconium, palladium, iron, titanium, copper, and magnesium, and used for a variety of applications from making golf clubs to aerospace construction. But much about them remains poorly understood.

Most people understand that investing in the future is important, and that goes for conserving nature and natural resources, too. But in the case of investing in such "natural" assets as groundwater, forests, and fish populations, it can be challenging to measure the return on that investment.

A Yale-led research team has adapted traditional asset valuation approaches to measure the value of such natural capital assets, linking economic measurements of ecosystem services with models of natural dynamics and human behavior.

Chestnut Hill, Mass (02/08/2016) - The damaging climate consequences of carbon emissions will grow and persist for millennia without a dramatic new global energy strategy, according to a new set of research-based climate change scenarios developed by an international team of scientists.

The Earth may suffer irreversible damage that could last tens of thousands of years because ofthe rate humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere.

In a new study in Nature Climate Change, researchers at Oregon State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborating institutions found that the longer-term impacts of climate change go well past the 21st century.

At the climate talks in Paris, all attention was focused on how humanity can reduce climate change by reducing carbon emissions, or by increasing carbon uptake. Forests are an important carbon sink. While most attention has focused on old-growth tropical forests, it turns out that secondary forests that re-grow after forest clearance or agricultural abandonment can sequester large amounts of carbon. Is this a forgotten sink?

European bison imported from Poland now roam Denmark's Baltic island of Bornholm in places where the animals haven't lived for thousands of years. Meanwhile, in a far corner of Siberia, scientists are attempting to reconstruct an ecosystem that was lost many thousands of years ago along with the woolly mammoth by introducing bison, musk oxen, moose, horses, and reindeer to a place they call Pleistocene Park.