SEATTLE, Wash. - Researchers have developed a new design for the framework of columns and beams that support bridges, called "bents," to improve performance for better resistance to earthquakes, less damage and faster on-site construction.
The faster construction is achieved by pre-fabricating the columns and beams off-site and shipping them to the site, where they are erected and connected quickly.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) and the University of Hawaii have uncovered the first step in the process that transforms gas-phase molecules into solid particles like soot and other carbon-based compounds.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Natural earthquakes and nuclear explosions produce seismic waves that register on seismic monitoring networks around the globe, allowing the scientific community to pinpoint the location of the events. In order to distinguish seismic waves produced by a variety of activities – from traffic to mining to explosions – scientists study the seismic waves generated by as many types of events as possible.
A Binghamton University physicist and his colleagues say they have unlocked one key mystery surrounding high-temperature superconductivity. Their research, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found a remarkable phenomenon in copper-oxide (cuprate) high-temperature superconductors.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers today announced the creation of an imaging technology more powerful than anything that has existed before, and is fast enough to observe life processes as they actually happen at the molecular level.
Chemical and biological actions can now be measured as they are occurring or, in old-fashioned movie parlance, one frame at a time. This will allow creation of improved biosensors to study everything from nerve impulses to cancer metastasis as it occurs.
Although scenes of people fleeing from dramatic displays of Mother Nature's power dominate the news, gradual increases in an area's overall temperature — and to a lesser extent precipitation — actually lead more often to permanent population shifts, according to Princeton University research.
When beams with trillions of particles go zipping around at near light speed, there's bound to be some chaos. Limiting that chaos in particle colliders is crucial for the groundbreaking results such experiments are designed to deliver.
WASHINGTON, June 30, 2014 — The Fourth of July is just days away, and that means millions of Americans will soon enjoy eye-popping fireworks displays around the country.
These dazzling light shows are actually carefully crafted chemical reactions.
This week's ACS Reactions episode features John Conkling, Ph.D., the professor who literally wrote the book on pyrotechnics.
In the video, Conkling explains the chemistry that creates those amazing fireworks displays..
Physicists from Umeå University and Humboldt University in Berlin have solved a mystery that has puzzled scientists for half a century. They show with the help of powerful microscopes that the distance between graphite oxide layers gradually increases when water molecules are added. That is because the surface of graphite oxide is not flat, but varies in thickness with "hills" and "valleys" of nanosize. The new findings are published in the scientific journal Nano Letters.
A group of researchers from Russia, Belarus and Spain, including Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology professor Yury Lozovik, have developed a microscopic force sensor based on carbon nanotubes. The device is described in an article published in the journal Computational Materials Science and is also available as a preprint.
The ability of microorganisms to overcome antibiotic treatments is one of the top concerns of modern medicine. The effectiveness of many antibiotics has been reduced by bacteria's ability to rapidly evolve and develop strategies to resist antibiotics. Bacteria achieve this by specific mechanisms that are tailored to the molecular structure or function of a particular antibiotic. For example, bacteria would typically develop drug resistance by evolving a mutation that breaks down the drug.
A team of physicists from the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) in Berlin, Germany, NTT Basic Research Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has used a scanning tunneling microscope to create quantum dots with identical, deterministic sizes. The perfect reproducibility of these dots opens the door to quantum dot architectures completely free of uncontrolled variations, an important goal for technologies from nanophotonics to quantum information processing as well as for fundamental studies.
Water splitting is one of the critical reactions that sustain life on earth, and could be a key to the creation of future fuels. It is a key in the process of photosynthesis, through which plants produce glucose and oxygen from water and carbon dioxide, using sunlight as energy. However, there are still significant mysteries about the process.
The impact of the greenhouse gas CO2 on the Earth's temperature is well established by climate models and temperature records over the past 100 years, as well as coupled records of carbon dioxide concentration and temperature throughout Earth history. However, past temperature records have suggested that warming is largely confined to mid-to-high latitudes, especially the poles, whereas tropical temperatures appear to be relatively stable: the tropical thermostat model.
An international team of scientists studying Emperor penguin populations across Antarctica finds the iconic animals in danger of dramatic declines by the end of the century due to climate change. Their study, published today in Nature Climate Change, finds the Emperor penguin "fully deserving of endangered status due to climate change."
The Emperor penguin is currently under consideration for inclusion under the US Endangered Species Act. Criteria to classify species by their extinction risk are based on the global population dynamics.