A team of researchers led by scientists from the American Museum of Natural History has released the first report of widespread biofluorescence in the tree of life of fishes, identifying more than 180 species that glow in a wide range of colors and patterns. Published today in PLOS ONE, the research shows that biofluorescence—a phenomenon by which organisms absorb light, transform it, and eject it as a different color—is common and variable among marine fish species, indicating its potential use in communication and mating.
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AUSTIN, Texas — Microscopic fungi that live in plants' roots play a major role in the storage and release of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, according to a University of Texas at Austin researcher and his colleagues at Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The role of these fungi is currently unaccounted for in global climate models.
Some types of symbiotic fungi can lead to 70 percent more carbon stored in the soil.
Cambridge, Mass. – January 8, 2014 – A team of Harvard scientists and engineers has demonstrated a new type of battery that could fundamentally transform the way electricity is stored on the grid, making power from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar far more economical and reliable.
When scientists discuss global change, they often focus on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and vegetation. But soil contains more carbon than air and plants combined. This means that even a minor change in soil carbon could have major implications for the Earth's atmosphere and climate. New research by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientist Benjamin Turner and colleagues points to an unexpected driver of soil carbon content: fungi.
Doctors may soon be able to diagnose stomach ulcers without taking tissue samples from the stomach. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark now report to have developed a new, safer and noninvasive diagnostic technique for ulcers. The trick is to make the ulcer-causing bacteria in the gut light up in fluorescent green.
Scientists are reporting the development of a novel metal ink made of small sheets of copper that can be used to write a functioning, flexible electric circuit on regular printer paper. Their report on the conductive ink, which could pave the way for a wide range of new bendable gadgets, such as electronic books that look and feel more like traditional paperbacks, appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Previous studies have established that carbon binds to tiny mineral particles. In this latest study, published in Nature Communications, researchers have shown that the surface of the minerals plays just as important a role as their size. "The carbon binds to minerals that are just a few thousandths of a millimeter in size – and it accumulates there almost exclusively on rough and angular surfaces," explains Prof. Ingrid Kögel-Knabner, TUM Chair of Soil Science.
The role of microorganisms in sequestering carbon
A sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) tax could help mitigate the rise in obesity and type 2 diabetes rates in India among both urban and rural populations, according to a study published this week in PLOS Medicine. Sanjay Basu and colleagues, from Stanford University, USA, estimated that a 20% SSB tax across India could avert 11.2 million cases of overweight/obesity and 400,000 cases of type 2 diabetes between 2014 and 2023, based on the current rate of increases in SSB sales.
Finding the most efficient way to transport items across a network like the U.S. highway system or the Internet is a problem that has taxed mathematicians and computer scientists for decades.
To tackle the problem, researchers have traditionally used a maximum-flow algorithm, also known as "max flow," in which a network is represented as a graph with a series of nodes, known as vertices, and connecting lines between them, called edges.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a simple, effective and relatively inexpensive technique for removing lignin from the plant material used to make biofuels, which may drive down the cost of biofuel production.
Lignin, nature's way of protecting plant cell walls, is difficult to break down or remove from plant materials called "biomass," such as the non-edible parts of the corn plant. However, that lignin needs to be extracted in order to reach the energy-rich cellulose that is used to make biofuels.
The research was conducted by researchers form Aalto University and University of Oxford, and was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) recently.
The control of light is vital to many applications, including imaging, communications, sensing, cancer treatment, and even welding processes for automobile parts. Transformation optics is an emerging field that has revolutionized our understanding of how to control light by constituting an effectively curved electromagnetic space.
HOUSTON – (Jan. 6, 2014) – Rice University scientists have pioneered a tabletop magnetic pulse generator that does the work of a room-sized machine – and more.
The device dubbed "RAMBO" – short for Rice Advanced Magnet with Broadband Optics – will allow researchers who visit the university to run spectroscopy-based experiments on materials in pulsed magnetic fields of up to 30 tesla. (A high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging system is about 10 tesla in strength.)
According to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, population-dense cities contribute less greenhouse gas emissions per person than other areas of the country, but these cities' extensive suburbs essentially wipe out the climate benefits.
Dominated by emissions from cars, trucks and other forms of transportation, suburbs account for about 50 percent of all household emissions – largely carbon dioxide – in United States.
Researchers from North Carolina State University and Johns Hopkins University have found that installing wind power plants at certain favorable locations in a power grid can make the grid more robust against extraneous disruptions.