Earth

A new study reveals that drug shortages affecting emergency care have skyrocketed in the United States in recent years. While the prevalence of such shortages fell from 2002 to 2007; the number of shortages sharply increased by 373% (from 26 to 123) from 2008 to 2014.

These medications are approved, but for various reasons manufacturers cannot meet demands or have stopped making the drugs.

Element 113, discovered by a RIKEN group led by Kosuke Morita, has become the first element on the periodic table found in Asia. Rewarding nearly a decade of painstaking work by Morita's group, a Joint Working Party of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) has recommended that the group, from the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science (RNC), be given recognition for the discovery of the new element. This news was conveyed to Dr. Morita through a letter on Dec. 31, 2015, from IUPAC.

Harvard researchers are challenging the widely-held theory that climate change could cause Amazon forests to rapidly change from forests to savannah.

A new model, based on the effect of water stress on individual trees, suggests the change would be a gradual transition from high-biomass forests to low-biomass forests and woodland ecosystems. The study is described in a recently published paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

TORONTO, January 4, 2016 - The Greenland ice sheet has traditionally been pictured as a bit of a sponge for glacier meltwater, but new research has found it is rapidly losing the ability to buffer its contribution to rising sea levels, says a York University researcher.

The firn layers of the Greenland ice sheet might store less meltwater than previously assumed. Researchers from the USA, Denmark and the University of Zurich fear that this could lead to increased release of the meltwater into the oceans.

Climate change impacts and associated changes in water resources could lead to reductions in electricity production capacity for more than 60% of the power plants worldwide from 2040-2069, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. Yet adaptation measures focused on making power plants more efficient and flexible could mitigate much of the decline.

Tropical Cyclone Ula affected the Fiji group of islands over the weekend of January 2 and 3. Early on January 4, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite showed the storm moved south as all Fiji warnings were dropped.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of Tropical Cyclone Ula moving away from Fiji on January 4, 2016. All warnings and watches for Fiji have been dropped. The visible-light image showed that the eye was no longer visible. Bands of thunderstorms continued to circle the center of the storm.

A new study into magma ascent by geoscientists at the University of Liverpool has found that temperature may be more important than pressure in generating gas bubbles which trigger explosive volcanic eruptions.

In a paper published in Nature, researchers at the University's School of Environmental Sciences showed that as magma ascends in volcanic conduits, it heats up which can melt its crystal cargo and force the formation of bubbles. Importantly, they also showed that more bubbles are formed by heating than through decompression, which had been previously thought.

04.01.2016: Traces of volcanic ash originating from islandic volcanoes have been found in the sediments of Laker Tiefer See in the Nossentiner-Schwinzer Heide natural park in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. This allows to more precisely date climate changes of the last 11500 years. An international team of geoscientists lead by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences identified traces of in total eight volcanic eruptions on Island of which six could be precisely identified.

Since October 2014 the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been diminishing and efforts have shifted from emergency response to prevention and mitigation of future outbreaks. Researchers from the Liberian Ministry of Health and the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modelling and Analysis evaluated 3532 Ebola cases reported in 2014 in order to quantify the impact of poverty on the transmission and spread of Ebola. They found that areas stricken by extreme poverty were more likely to be associated with high rates of Ebola transmission and spread.

Tropical Depression 9C formed in the Central Pacific, 30 days after the official end to the Central Pacific Hurricane Season. An image from NOAA's GOES-West satellite revealed the late-season tropical depression was still struggling to organize.

Tropical Depression 9C (TD9C) formed at 0300 UTC on Dec. 31 (10 p.m. EST on Dec. 30) in the Central Pacific, just north of the Equator and far to the southwest of the Johnston Atoll.

As Tropical Cyclone Ula was coming together, NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of the consolidating storm in the Southern Pacific Ocean.

NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured an image of the tropical low pressure areas designated as System 92P in the South Pacific Ocean on Dec. 29, 2015 at 2322 UTC (6:22 p.m. EST). The low pressure area continued to consolidate and organize and was designated Tropical Cyclone Ula on Dec. 30, 2015, at 0900 UTC (4 a.m. EST), east of American Samoa.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) designed for plateau missions are usually installed with high span chord ratio wings, which provides more lifting force at a relatively low airspeed. The UAVs employ high span chord ratio wings, however, tend to lose their maneuverability. Hence, they usually need larger turning radius and unable to maintain the altitude during sharp slope turning as the lifting force produced by the wings decrease dramatically when the bank angle is large. The discarding of the flight performances may risk the safety of the flight in plateau mountain regions.

Boulder, Colo., USA - In their article for Geosphere, R. Craig Kochel and colleagues discuss the geomorphic impact of the flooding caused Tropical Storm Lee in September 2011 on several large watersheds of the Susquehanna River in the Appalachian Plateau region of north-central Pennsylvania. Unlike many Appalachian floods, the physical impacts to channels and floodplains were extensive.

On an arid plateau in the Andes Mountains of southern Bolivia, a Case Western Reserve University researcher flagged what turned out to be the fossil remains of a tortoise nearly five feet long -- a find indicating this highland was likely less than a kilometer above sea level 13 million years ago.

Fossilized shell pieces of a much smaller, aquatic turtle found nearby support the altitude estimate and also indicate the climate was much wetter than today.