Earth

AUSTIN, Texas — The storage capacity of hard disk drives could increase by a factor of five thanks to processes developed by chemists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers' technique, which relies on self-organizing substances known as block copolymers, was described this week in an article in Science. It's also being given a real-world test run in collaboration with HGST, one of the world's leading innovators in disk drives.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (11/12/2012) —If you've eaten fish, gone for a boat ride or even taken a drink from the tap, you know clean water is a valuable commodity. But just how valuable? That's always been a tough question for policy makers to answer as they weigh the worth of clean water against societal needs that compromise it, such as the need to grow food or produce fossil fuels.

LAGOS, Nigeria – Fifteen science academies of Africa issued a joint statement in Lagos, Nigeria, today calling on the African scientific community to intensify its study of the impact of climate change. Noting that Africa's contribution of scientific information to understanding climate change has been "meagre" to date, the statement calls for African researchers to step up their observation, modeling, and analyses of the effects of climate change on a regional scale, and to help plan interventions to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change on the continent.

Have you ever thought to use a clock to identify mineral deposits or concealed water resources within the Earth? An international team headed by astrophysicists Philippe Jetzer and Ruxandra Bondarescu from the University of Zurich is convinced that ultraprecise portable atomic clocks will make this a reality in the next decade. The scientists argue that these atomic clocks have already reached the necessary degree of precision to be useful for geophysical surveying. They say that such clocks will provide the most direct measurement of the geoid – the Earth's true physical form.

Researchers using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have found a way to strip most of the electrons from xenon atoms, creating a "supercharged," strongly positive state at energies previously thought too low.

The findings, which defy expectations and theory, could help scientists deliberately induce the high levels of damage needed to study extreme states of matter or ward off damage in samples they're trying to image. The results were reported this week in Nature Photonics.

The impact of climate change on many aspects of cultural life for people all over the world is not being sufficiently accounted for by scientists and policy-makers. University of Exeter-led research by an international team, published on 11th November in Nature Climate Change, shows that cultural factors are key to making climate change real to people and to motivating their responses.

AMARILLO – An accurate estimation of nitrous oxide and methane emissions from beef cattle feedlots is an increasing concern given the current and potential future reporting requirements for greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr. Ken Casey, Texas A&M AgriLife Research air quality engineer in Amarillo, is working on an ongoing study to quantify the nitrous oxide and methane emission rates from pen surfaces at two commercial beef cattle feedlots in Texas.