Tropical Cyclone Gillian made landfall on the western Cape York Peninsula of Queensland, Australia, weakened and has now meandered back over water. On March 12, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of the remnants in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria.
Earth
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have created a new type of "ultracold" molecule, using lasers to cool atoms nearly to absolute zero and then gluing them together, a technology that might be applied to quantum computing, precise sensors and advanced simulations.
"It sounds counterintuitive, but you can use lasers to take away the kinetic energy, resulting in radical cooling," said Yong P. Chen, an associate professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.
SALT LAKE CITY, March 12, 2014 – University of Utah chemists discovered how vibrations in chemical bonds can be used to predict chemical reactions and thus design better catalysts to speed reactions that make medicines, industrial products and new materials.
"The vibrations alone are not adequate, but combined with other classical techniques in physical organic chemistry, we are able to predict how reactions can occur," says chemistry professor Matt Sigman, senior author of the study in the Thursday, March 13, issue of the journal Nature.
LA JOLLA, CA—March 12, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a method for modifying organic molecules that significantly expands the possibilities for developing new pharmaceuticals and improving old ones.
"This is a technology that can be applied directly to many medicinally relevant compounds," said Jin-Quan Yu, a professor in TSRI's Department of Chemistry and the senior author of the new report, which appears in Nature March 13, 2014.
The team of Francesca Ferlaino, Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, has experimentally shown chaotic behavior of particles in a quantum gas. "For the first time we have been able to observe quantum chaos in the scattering behavior of ultracold atoms," says an excited Ferlaino. The physicists used random matrix theory to confirm their results, thus asserting the universal character of this statistical theory. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner formulated random matrix theory to describe complex systems in the 1950s.
PITTSBURGH—British mathematician Alan Turing's accomplishments in computer science are well known—he's the man who cracked the German Enigma code, expediting the Allies' victory in World War II. He also had a tremendous impact on biology and chemistry. In his only paper in biology, Turing proposed a theory of morphogenesis, or how identical copies of a single cell differentiate, for example, into an organism with arms and legs, a head and tail.
Will one-atom-thick layers of molybdenum disulfide, a compound that occurs naturally in rocks, prove to be better than graphene for electronic applications? There are many signs that might prove to be the case. But physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw have shown that the nature of the phenomena occurring in layered materials are still ill-understood and require further research.
Policies aimed at effectively mitigating climate change through a reduction in economic growth and consumption of fossil fuels would have a monetary impact on the economy, but also an impact on the wellbeing and happiness of individuals. Researchers at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the UAB have taken advantage of the current economic crisis to analyse the impact this situation would have.
Boston and Baltimore. Miami and Minneapolis. Phoenix and Los Angeles.
Fanned across the United States and in locations from coast to prairie to desert, what do these cities have in common?
How their human residents manage that icon of America, the urban lawn, or so hypothesized a team of scientists. However, when they conducted a study comparing residential landscapes in these six cities, they discovered that lawn care practices had fewer similarities than they expected.
Poisoning of dingoes - the top predators in the Australian bush - has a deleterious effect on small native mammals such as marsupial mice, bandicoots and native rodents, a UNSW-led study shows.
The research, in forested National Parks in NSW, found that loss of dingoes after baiting is associated with greater activity by foxes, which prey on small marsupials and native rodents.
A unique method to collect rain water samples during Hurricane Sandy has revealed the storm's chemical "signature" with a new level of detail. The technique may also lead to weather model advances that will ultimately improve storm prediction, say researchers at the University of Utah whose study was published online today in PLOS ONE.
A new NASA study shows Earth's climate likely will continue to warm during this century on track with previous estimates, despite the recent slowdown in the rate of global warming.
Boulder, Colo., USA – On 27 Feb. and 6 Mar. 2014, GSA Bulletin published 11 articles online ahead of print, including two that are open access: "O2 constraints from Paleoproterozoic detrital pyrite and uraninite" and "Sediment transfer and deposition in slope channels: Deciphering the record of enigmatic deep-sea processes from outcrop." Other articles cover geological features in the Alps; the Appalachians; Death Valley; India; the Himalaya; the Columbia River Basalt Province; San Simeon, California; Kaua'i, Hawai'i; and artic Canada.
The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres (JGR-D), and Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface (JGR-F).
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SAN FRANCISCO, March 11, 2014 -- In the global aftershock zone that followed the major April 2012 Indian Ocean earthquake, seismologists noticed an unusual pattern – a dynamic "stress shadow," or period of seismic silence when some faults near failure were temporarily rendered incapable of a large rupture.