New research at King's College London may lead to improved solar cells and LED-displays. Researchers from the Biophysics and Nanotechnology Group at King's, led by Professor Anatoly Zayats in the department of Physics have demonstrated in detail how to separate colours and create 'rainbows' using nanoscale structures on a metal surface. The research is published in Nature's Scientific Reports.
Earth
The flooding in New York and New Jersey caused by Superstorm Sandy prompted calls from Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other officials to consider building storm surge barriers to protect Lower Manhattan from future catastrophes. But, such a strategy could make things even worse for outlying areas that were hit hard by the hurricane, such as Staten Island, the New Jersey Shore and Long Island's South Shore, a City College of New York landscape architecture professor warns.
'Dark Energy': Life beneath the seafloor discussed at upcoming American Geophysical Union conference
"Who in his wildest dreams could have imagined that, beneath the crust of our Earth, there could exist a real ocean...a sea that has given shelter to species unknown?"
So wrote Jules Verne almost 150 years ago in A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Verne probably couldn't have imagined the diversity of life that researchers observe today under the ocean floor.
Philadelphia, Pa. (November 19, 2012) – Portable bed rails marketed to "make any bed safer" actually increase the risk of injury and death, according to an article in the November 15 issue of Biomedical Safety & Standards (BS&S).
Hydrogen, the lightest element, can easily dissolve and migrate within metals to make these otherwise ductile materials brittle and substantially more prone to failures.
"Our analysis shows that the Norse in Greenland ate lots of food from the sea, especially seals," says Jan Heinemeier, Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University.
"Even though the Norse are traditionally thought of as farmers, they adapted quickly to the Arctic environment and the unique hunting opportunities. During the period they were in Greenland, the Norse ate gradually more seals. By the 14th century, seals made up between 50 and 80 per cent of their diet."
This study uses high-resolution, two-dimensional seismic reflection data, collected by ION Geophysical Corporation as part of the BeaufortSPAN East survey, to examine the seismic stratigraphy and sedimentary architecture of a 1000-km-long section of the Beaufort Sea margin.
The Antarctic ice sheets drain from the continent interior to the ocean via fast flowing ice streams. As the ice within these streams moves, it erodes and modifies the bed over which it travels. Some of the eroded material is trapped within the ice as mineral and rock fragments and transported into the ocean as icebergs.
The climate of Central America is influenced by changing conditions in both the North Atlantic region and the tropical Pacific Ocean, and how these systems have varied in the past to affect precipitation patterns in the tropics is poorly understood.
Our ability to predict future changes in water resource availability requires a longer-term perspective based on the geologic record. In this paper, Nathan D. Stansell and colleagues analyze lake sediments from Nicaragua for their oxygen isotopic composition in order to infer past changes precipitation during the last ~1,400 years.
The diversity of fossils recorded by paleontologists from the geological record is the product of two factors -- original biodiversity and the completeness of the geological rock record that survives today to be sampled.
Andrew B. Smith and Roger B.J. Benson show that species diversity of Cretaceous echinoids can be predicted with a high degree of precision from proxies for marine sedimentary bedrock area and habitat diversity that is captured by the rock record.
The greatest extinction event in Earth's history, the Latest Permian Extinction, saw a loss of more than 90% of the planet's species. Second to the mystery of what caused this extinction is why life on Earth took a prolonged five-million years to recover (referred to as the Early Triassic period).
Changes in vegetation from coastal mangroves to montane forest are used to record the emergence of Timor from the sea and to track the uplift of the island from sea level to over 2000 m above sea level.
The island started to emerge soon after 4.5 million years ago, but the uplift dramatically accelerated after 3.1 million years ago to rates of 2-5 mm per year.
Mountain glaciers respond to climate change by rapidly advancing or receding as temperatures vary, and this change in glacier extent controls hydrology, sediment transport, and deposition in rivers downstream.
For the past 17 million years and perhaps longer, motion of Earth's tectonic plates has moved California west, away from Utah and Arizona.
As the area in between grew wider, Earth's crust cracked along major faults to form the mountains and valleys of the Basin and Range Province that today cover Nevada and western Utah. In the early stages of this process, large amounts of molten basalt intruded Earth's crust in northern Nevada, forming a linear, near-vertical dike swarm over 500 km long.
A video explaining the fragility of the welfare state.
(Photo Credit: UC3M)
Source: Carlos III University of Madrid