NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – April 15, 2013 – A debate among scientists about the geologic formation of the supervolcano encompassing the region around Yellowstone National Park has taken a major step forward, thanks to new evidence provided by a team of international researchers led by University of Rhode Island Professor Christopher Kincaid.
In a publication appearing in last week's edition of Nature Geoscience, the URI team demonstrated that both sides of the debate may be right.
A type of marine algae could become bigger as increasing carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by the oceans, according to research led by scientists based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS).
A team led by the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger has now carried out an experiment with photons, in which they have closed an important loophole. The researchers have thus provided the most complete experimental proof that the quantum world is in conflict with our everyday experience. The results of this study appear this week in the renowned journal Nature (Advance Online Publication/AOP).
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Marine scientists have long understood the detrimental effect of fossil fuel emissions on marine ecosystems. But a group led by a UC Santa Barbara professor has found a point of resilience in a microscopic shelled plant with a massive environmental impact, which suggests the future of ocean life may not be so bleak.
Plants need nitrogen to grow, and nitrate is a common fertilizer ingredient, but high levels of nitrate contamination in drinking water sources can cause health problems. It is generally known that nitrogen flows through watersheds from upslope areas down to streams, but the relationships between upslope soil solution or groundwater nitrate concentrations and stream water nitrate levels—and the ways in which land use changes may alter this relationship—are not fully understood.
BOULDER – With coastal areas bracing for rising sea levels, new research indicates that cutting emissions of certain pollutants can greatly slow down sea level rise this century.
The research team found that reductions in four pollutants that cycle comparatively quickly through the atmosphere could temporarily forestall the rate of sea level rise by roughly 25 to 50 percent.
In the last few decades, glaciers at the edge of the icy continent of Antarctica have been thinning, and research has shown the rate of thinning has accelerated and contributed significantly to sea level rise.
New ice core research suggests that, while the changes are dramatic, they cannot be attributed with confidence to human-caused global warming, said Eric Steig, a University of Washington professor of Earth and space sciences.
Surface waters in upwelling regions of the ocean are generally rich in nutrients. Scientists had thought that these areas would have low rates of nitrogen fixation because diazotrophs-microbes that convert nitrogen gas from the atmosphere into usable forms, such as ammonia-could use the nutrients in the water directly instead of having to fix nitrogen gas.
However, researchers recently recorded high rates of nitrogen fixation in an upwelling region in the equatorial Atlantic.
Nonnative species can affect the biogeochemistry of an ecosystem. For instance, Pacific salmon have been introduced as a sport fishery in many streams and lakes beyond their native range, but their introduction may be altering nitrogen cycling in those ecosystems.
According to the analysis, carbon dioxide removal could be used under certain requirements to alleviate the most costly components of mitigation, but it would not replace the bulk of actual emissions reductions.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The Maya are famous for their complex, intertwined calendric systems, and now one calendar, the Maya Long Count, is empirically calibrated to the modern European calendar, according to an international team of researchers.
"The Long Count calendar fell into disuse before European contact in the Maya area," said Douglas J. Kennett, professor of environmental archaeology, Penn State.
New York, NY—April 11, 2013—Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Boston University have developed the first method to map evaporation globally using weather stations, which will help scientists evaluate water resource management, assess recent trends of evaporation throughout the globe, and validate surface hydrologic models in various conditions. The study was published in the April 1 online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Harvard researchers are adding statistical nuance to our understanding of how modern and historical temperatures compare.
LIVERMORE, Calif.— Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories' Combustion Research Facility, the University of Manchester, Bristol University, University of Southampton and Hong Kong Polytechnic have successfully measured reaction rates of a second Criegee intermediate, CH3CHOO, and proven that the reactivity of the atmospheric chemical depends strongly on which way the molecule is twisted.
Quantum computers promise to perform certain types of operations much more quickly than conventional digital computers. But many challenges must be addressed before these ultra-fast machines become available, among them, the loss of order in the systems – a problem known as quantum decoherence – which worsens as the number of bits in a quantum computer increases.