Earth
Understanding what influences the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been identified by the American Geophysical Union to be one of the foremost challenges in the earth sciences in the coming decades because of methane's hugely important role in meeting climate warming targets.
Methane is the second most important human-made greenhouse gas and is rising in the atmosphere more rapidly than predicted for reasons that are not well-understood. It is roughly 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide for warming the Earth over a century timescale.
Sophia Antipolis, 10 December 2019: Middle-income countries shoulder the bulk of morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD) in Europe, according to a major report published today in European Heart Journal, the flagship journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1
The document details the burden of CVD in the 57 ESC member countries,2 the infrastructure and human resources available for treatment, and the vast differences between states in access to modern diagnostics and therapies.
Axions are hypothetical elementary particles which were first postulated by physicists in order to solve the so-called strong CP problem, a theoretical inadequacy of the strong interaction. However, in the past few years it has emerged that axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) could also help to solve other puzzles in modern physics.
In 1945, the Soviet Army seized the film archive of the Third Reich, the so-called Reichfilmarchive, and brought it from Berlin to Moscow. The archive contained thousands of movies from various countries. Since then, the German, American, and a few European trophies circulated throughout the Soviet Union despite a lack of an effective distribution license. This copyright violation turned out to be a stumbling block in the relations between the USSR and the USA, while the early Cold War confrontation between the two superpowers added a political twist to the conflict.
Cold cloud top temperatures can tell forecasters if a tropical cyclone has the potential to generate heavy rainfall, and that is exactly what NASA's Aqua satellite found when it observed the temperatures in Tropical Cyclone Belna over northwestern Madagascar.
One of the ways NASA researches tropical cyclones is using infrared data that provides temperature information. The AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a look at those temperatures in Belna and gave insight into the storm's strength.
Prior to starting the project, which involved 3,000 primary school children across North East England, knowledge of UK mammals was generally poor. On average, pupils were able to name only three wild UK mammals. In most cases pupils were able to name more domestic animals than wild animals and a quarter of pupils named zoo animals like lions.
The benefits of multispecies mixtures were so strong that yields from a mixture of four species under drought conditions matched or exceeded yields for monocultures under normal rainfall conditions.
The four species tested were agriculturally important and used for grazing livestock in temperate regions: perennial ryegrass, chicory, red clover and white clover.
Despite some claims that Americans are in the midst of a "loneliness epidemic," older people today may not be any lonelier than their counterparts from previous generations - there just might be more of them, according to a pair of studies published by the American Psychological Association.
Neurons in the brain's motor cortex previously thought of as active mainly during hand and arm movements also light up during speech in a way that is similar to patterns of brain activity linked to these movements, suggest new findings published today in eLife.
By demonstrating that it is possible to identify different syllables or words from patterns of neural activity, the study provides insights that could potentially be used to restore the voice in people who have lost the ability to speak.
Dead zones within the world's oceans - where there is almost no oxygen to sustain life - could be expanding far quicker than currently thought, a new study suggests.
The regions are created when large amounts of organic material produced by algae sinks towards the seafloor, using up the oxygen present in the deep water.
Computer models can predict the spread of these zones, with the aim being to provide an insight into the impact they might have on the wider marine environment.
For as many as one in three people, life events or situations that pose no real danger can spark a disabling fear, a hallmark of anxiety and stress-related disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants help about half the people suffering from anxiety, but millions of others do not find sufficient relief from existing therapies.
Researchers at Yale University and Weill Cornell Medicine report Dec. 9 on a novel way that could help combat such anxiety: When life triggers excessive fear, use a safety signal.
Scientists have identified systematic meanders in the globe-circling northern jet stream that have caused simultaneous crop-damaging heat waves in widely separated breadbasket regions-a previously unquantified threat to global food production that, they say, could worsen with global warming. The research shows that certain kinds of waves in the atmospheric circulation can become amplified and then lock in place for extended periods, triggering the concurrent heat waves. Affected parts of North America, Europe and Asia together produce a quarter of the world food supply.
Washington, DC-- Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is of great interest to scientists due to its subsurface ocean, making it a prime target for those searching for life elsewhere. New research led by Carnegie's Doug Hemingway reveals the physics governing the fissures through which oceanwater erupts from the moon's icy surface, giving its south pole an unusual "tiger stripe" appearance.
An inflammatory marker called sCD14 is related to brain atrophy, cognitive decline and dementia, according to a study of more than 4,700 participants from two large community-based heart studies. The study was published Monday, Dec. 9, in the journal Neurology.
LA JOLLA--(December 9, 2019) While scientists know of about 25,000 genes that code for biologically important proteins, additional, smaller genes hiding in our DNA may be just as important. But these tiny lines of genetic code have proven tough to track down.
A new study from the Salk Institute identified over 2,000 new, small genes--expanding the number of human genes by 10 percent. These previously unknown genes are known as small open reading frames (smORFs), and the scientists have developed a method for detecting these important genetic sequences in human cell lines.