Services provided by Mother Nature, such as pest control from insect-eating bats, are affected by market forces like most anything else in the economy, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, study finds.
The study's results have implications for biodiversity conservation efforts.
Government initiatives to improve access to healthy foods may have a limited impact on obesity in the US, according to new research by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Penn State University.
Alexandria, VA – A complex interaction between lava and water, rather than a fight between mythical troll-beasts of lore, is responsible for the occurrence of rare terrestrial basalt pillars. EARTH Magazine uncovers the truth behind the pillars in the February issue. Despite regional tales of a fight between a pair of angry trolls resulting in the moss-covered basalt pillars, geoscientists from the University at Buffalo have determined that the pillars formed during a rare, nonexplosive lava-water interface during the 1783 eruption at Laki.
The same physics that gives tornadoes their ferocious stability lies at the heart of new University of Washington research, and could lead to a better understanding of nuclear dynamics in studying fission, superconductors and the workings of neutron stars.
The work seeks to clarify what Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers witnessed when in 2013 they named a mysterious phenomenon — an unusual long-lived wave traveling much more slowly than expected through a gas of cold atoms. They called this wave a "heavy soliton" and claimed it defied theoretical description.
Perfect sheets of diamond a few atoms thick appear to be possible even without the big squeeze that makes natural gems.
Scientists have speculated about it and a few labs have even seen signs of what they call diamane, an extremely thin film of diamond that has all of diamond's superior semiconducting and thermal properties.
Falmouth, Mass. – A team of Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) scientists created maps of habitat corridors connecting protected areas in the tropics to incorporate biodiversity co-benefits into climate change mitigation strategies. Drs. Patrick Jantz, Scott Goetz, and Nadine Laporte describe their findings in an article entitled, "Carbon stock corridors to mitigate climate change and promote biodiversity in the tropics," available online in the journal Nature Climate Change on January 26.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Big data is changing the field of ecology. The shift is dramatic enough to warrant the creation of an entirely new field: macrosystems ecology.
Belgian scientists have used a particle physics theory to describe the behaviour of particle-like entities, referred to as excitons, in two layers of graphene, a one-carbon-atom-thick honeycomb crystal. In a paper published in EPJ B, Michael Sarrazin from the University of Namur, and Fabrice Petit from the Belgian Ceramic Research Centre in Mons, studied the behaviour of excitons in a bilayer of graphene through an analogy with excitons evolving in two abstract parallel worlds, described with equations typically used in high-energy particle physics.
Undertaken by researchers from the University's Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology (DICE), the research evaluates the ecological and habitat needs of wildlife in the region and the socio-economic needs and priorities of the local forest-dependent community, known as the Gujjars.
The research aims to provide an objective framework for conservationists and policymakers to prioritise efforts in order to reach their goal of doubling tiger numbers by 2022.
Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg are working on a heat engine that consists of just a single ion. Such a nano-heat engine could be far more efficient than, for example, a car engine or a coal-fired power plant. A usual heat engine transforms heat into utilizable mechanical energy with the corresponding efficiency of an Otto engine amounting to only about 25 percent, for instance. The proposed nano-heat engine consisting of a single calcium ion would be much more efficient.
Jerusalem, February 2, 2014 – Can naturally occurring processes selectively buffer the full brunt of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities?
Yes, find researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
As the globe warms, ocean temperatures rise, leading to increased water vapor escaping into the atmosphere. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and its impact on climate is amplified in the stratosphere.