A University of Texas at Arlington research team says recently identified radiation detection properties of a light-emitting nanostructure built in their lab could open doors for homeland security and medical advances.
Earth
MADISON, Wis. — Mountain pine beetles get a bad rap, and understandably so. The grain-of-rice-sized insects are responsible for killing pine trees over tens of millions of acres in the Western U.S. and Canada over the last decade.
But contrary to popular belief, these pests may not be to blame for more severe wildfires like those that have recently swept through the region. Instead, weather and topography play a greater role in the ecological severity of fires than these bark-boring beetles.
The atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought in California are very likely linked to human-caused climate change, researchers report.
Climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University and colleagues used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean--one that diverted storms away from California--was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations.
Boulder, Colo., USA – For decades, planetary geologists have speculated that glaciers might once have crept through Valles Marineris, the 2000-mile-long chasm that constitutes the Grand Canyon of Mars. Using satellite images, researchers have identified features that might have been carved by past glaciers as they flowed through the canyons; however, these observations have remained highly controversial and contested.
Chemical fingerprints of the element nitrogen vary by extremes in materials from the molecules of life to the solar wind to interstellar dust. Ideas for how this great variety came about have included alien molecules shuttled in by icy comets from beyond our solar system and complex chemical scenarios.
An expedition from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Carnegie Institute of Science has measured a roughly 40% reduction in the rate of calcium carbonate deposited in Australia's Great Barrier Reef in the last 35 years — a scenario that could damage the reef framework and endanger the entire coral ecosystem.
The atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought currently afflicting California are "very likely" linked to human-caused climate change, Stanford scientists say.
In a new study, a team led by Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure hovering over the Pacific Ocean that diverted storms away from California was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations.
Australia's hottest year on record in 2013 along with the accompanying droughts, heat waves and record-breaking seasons of that year was virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused global warming.
New research from ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (ARCCSS) researchers and colleagues, over five different Australian papers in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), has highlighted the powerful influence of global warming on Australia's climate.
Oktoberfest is here, and that means beer. And there's nothing worse than reaching for a cold one, taking that first sip and realizing your beer's been skunked: chemicals have reacted to form compounds that cause an awful, bitter taste.
This week, Reactions explains why beers get skunky, and what you can do to keep your brews from going bad.
Source: American Chemical Society
A new model developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge has shown that despite its apparent stability, the massive ice sheet covering most of Greenland is more sensitive to climate change than earlier estimates have suggested, which would accelerate the rising sea levels that threaten coastal communities worldwide.
Scientists have found amphibians worldwide are breeding earlier due to climate change, but how that affects species is just now being answered.
After warmer winters, wood frogs breed earlier and produce fewer eggs, a Case Western Reserve University researcher has found.
Michael F. Benard, the George B. Mayer Chair in Urban and Environmental Studies and assistant professor of biology, also found that frogs produce more eggs during winters with more rain and snow.
As a child in southern California, Ryan Rykaczewski spent a fair amount of time on his grandfather's boat, fishing with him off the Pacific coast near Los Angeles. At the time, he didn't think there was much rhyme or reason to their luck on the water.
"Sometimes we'd catch a lot of fish and sometimes we didn't," he says. "I just thought it was chaotic, that we could never understand what was going on."
Earth's atmosphere is a complicated dance of molecules. The chemical output of plants, animals and human industry rise into the air and pair off in sequences of chemical reactions. Such processes help maintain the atmosphere's chemical balance; for example, some break down pollutants emitted from the burning of fossil fuels.
Understanding exactly how these reactions proceed is critical for predicting how the atmosphere will respond to environmental changes, but some of the steps of this dance are so quick that all of the molecules involved haven't been measured in the wild.
An interdisciplinary team of University of Pennsylvania researchers has now applied a cutting-edge technique for rapid gene sequencing toward measuring other nanoscopic structures. By passing nanoscale spheres and rods through a tiny hole in a membrane, the team was able to measure the electrical properties of those structures' surfaces.
Their findings suggest new ways of using this technique, known as "nanopore translocation," to analyze objects at the smallest scale.
WASHINGTON (Sept. 26, 2014)—A new global analysis released today by the National Geographic Society and GlobeScan finds that concern about environmental problems has increased in most countries surveyed, and that more people now expect global warming will negatively affect them during their lifetime than in 2012. Despite this, National Geographic's Greendex, a comprehensive measure of consumer behavior in 65 areas related to housing, transportation, food and consumer goods, shows that sustainable consumer behavior has only grown slowly.