The 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and resulting tsunami are now infamous for the damage they caused, but at the time many scientists believed this area was unlikely to create a quake of such magnitude. In the March 23 issue of the journal Science, a geophysicist from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute urges the public and policy makers to consider all subduction-type tectonic boundaries to be "locked, loaded, and dangerous."
Culture
A team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Almería has completed its second part of the "Proyecto La Puntilla", an archaeological expedition to the Peruvian province of Nazca, where last year it discovered a new type of construction. The latest findings show that a new political power based on the exercise of violence emerged on the south coast of Peru two thousand years ago. There was a State in which an aristocracy, based in Cahuachi, exercised its dominion on other, poorer communities in the Nazca Valley.
UCF's Conservatory Theatre and its partners are pushing the envelope of traditional theater by not only bringing it into the 21st Century, but launching it into the 22nd.
Using new techniques that merge the Internet 2 with traditional stage theatre, the University of Central Florida, Bradley University in Illinois and the University of Waterloo in Canada performed a play that put actors from Florida and Canada on the stage in Illinois without them ever leaving their respective campuses.
After years of results that repeatedly dogged him, University of Oregon geologist Douglas R. Toomey decided to follow the trail of data surfacing from the Pacific Ocean. In doing so, he and his collaborators may have altered long-held assumptions involving plate tectonics on the ocean floor.
Research funded by Metallica?
Gifted students who feel the pressure of their ability could be using Heavy Metal music to get rid of negative emotions.
This is the conclusion of Stuart Cadwallader and Professor Jim Campbell of The National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth at the University of Warwick. They will discuss their findings at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference at the University of York on Wednesday 21 March 2007.
Using lasers and tuning forks, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a chemical weapon agent sensing technique that promises to meet or exceed current and emerging defense and homeland security chemical detection requirements. The technique, called Quartz Laser Photo-Acoustic Sensing, or "QPAS," is now ready for prototyping and field testing.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), adolescents and young adults currently account for fifty percent of new HIV infections on an annual basis. As a result, ongoing research and information on HIV prevention has become a high priority for this age group. Now a new study reveals that helping adolescents manage their emotions may be just as important as providing them with information on the practical side of safe sex in order to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
Since the beginning of the industrial age the ocean has absorbed about half of all anthropic(1) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. This has led to an acidification of sea water. Frédéric Gazeau, a scientist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, and his colleagues, including Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Director of Research at the Oceanographic laboratory at Villefranche-sur-Mer (CNRS/Université Pierre et Marie Curie) have examined the reaction of oysters and mussels cultivated in Europe to this acidification of the oceans.
A federal law requiring publicly traded firms to disclose whether they have adopted codes of ethics for their senior financial officers may be useful, but a Penn State researcher says its impact is often limited.
A firm's board of directors needs to be the driving force behind creating and implementing the program in most cases for it to truly be successful.
A new nanoscale apparatus developed at JILA—a tiny gold beam whose 40 million vibrations per second are measured by hopping electrons—offers the potential for a 500-fold increase in the speed of scanning tunneling microscopes (STM), perhaps paving the way for scientists to watch atoms vibrate in high definition in real time.
This slow-motion simulation of the JILA nanoscale motion detector shows the wiggling of a floppy metal beam, just 100 nanometers thick, as it is struck by an electric current at the dot.
Sandia’s huge Z machine, which generates termperatures hottter than the sun, has turned water to ice in nanoseconds. However, don’t expect anything commercial just yet: the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water. "The three phases of water as we know them — cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor — are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states," says Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. "Compressing water customarily heats it.
A new NASA study has found that an important counter-balance to the warming of our planet by greenhouse gases – sunlight blocked by dust, pollution and other aerosol particles – appears to have lost ground.
This new estimate comes from mapping the thickness of the dusty ice by the Mars Express radar instrument that has made more than 300 virtual slices through layered deposits covering the pole. The radar sees through icy layers to the lower boundary, which in places is as deep as 3.7 kilometres below the surface.
Video evidence that an extinct woodpecker is alive and well in Arkansas, USA may prove to be a case of mistaken identity. Research published today in the open access journal BMC Biology shows how fleeting images thought to be the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis could be another native woodpecker species.
Tiny tremors and temblors recently discovered in fault zones from California to Japan are generated by slow-moving earthquakes that may foreshadow catastrophic seismic events, according to scientists at Stanford University and the University of Tokyo.
In a study published in the March 15 issue of the journal Nature, the research team focused on weak seismic signals known as "non-volcanic tremor" and "low-frequency earthquakes," which seismologists say may be useful in forecasting the likelihood of potentially destructive mega-quakes of magnitude 8 or higher.