Earth

Fruity science halves fat in chocolate

Scientists have found a way to replace up to 50 per cent of chocolate's fat content with fruit juice.

University of Warwick chemists have taken out much of the cocoa butter and milk fats that go into chocolate bars, substituting them with tiny droplets of juice measuring under 30 microns in diameter.

They infused orange and cranberry juice into milk, dark and white chocolate using what is known as a Pickering emulsion.

Crucially, the clever chemistry does not take away the chocolatey 'mouth-feel' given by the fatty ingredients.

Modeling reveals significant climatic impacts of megapolitan expansion

TEMPE, Ariz. – According to the United Nations' 2011 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, global urban population is expected to gain more than 2.5 billion new inhabitants through 2050. Such sharp increases in the number of urban dwellers will require considerable conversion of natural to urban landscapes, resulting in newly developing and expanding megapolitan areas. Could climate impacts arising from built environment growth pose additional concerns for urban residents also expected to deal with impacts resulting from global climate change?

Stabilizing shell effects in heaviest elements directly measured

So-called "superheavy" elements owe their very existence exclusively to shell effects within the atomic nucleus. Without this stabilization they would disintegrate in a split second due to the strong repulsion between their many protons. The constituents of an atomic nucleus, the protons and neutrons, organize themselves in shells. Certain "magic" configurations with completely filled shells render the protons and neutrons to be more strongly bound together.

Risk assessment: Earthquake risks in Europe

How strong can earthquakes in Germany be? Where in Europa are the earthquake activities concentrated? These questions are the basis for risk assessments and become relevant when it comes to the safety of buildings or the generation of tsunami.For the first time, scientists of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have succeeded in setting up a harmonized catalogue of earthquakes for Europe and the Mediterranean for the last thousand years. This catalogue consists of about 45000 earthquakes, reported in the latest issue of the „Journal of Seismology".

Physicists explore properties of electrons in revolutionary material

ATLANTA – Scientists from Georgia State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a new way to examine certain properties of electrons in graphene – a very thin material that may hold the key to new technologies in computing and other fields.

Ramesh Mani, associate professor of physics at GSU, working in collaboration with Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor of physics at Georgia Tech, measured the spin properties of the electrons in graphene, a material made of carbon atoms that is only one atom thick.

Better fracking future: a cheaper and cleaner catalyst for burning methane developed

As the world's currently developed oil reserves dwindle,and activist insistence that oil should not be extracted in new places like ANWR, natural gas has become an increasingly important energy source. The primary component of natural gas is methane, which has the advantage of releasing less carbon dioxide when it's burned than do many other hydrocarbon fuels - but there is a catch.

Freezing magnetic monopoles

Magnetic monopoles, entities with isolated north or south magnetic poles, weren't supposed to exist. If you try to saw a bar magnet in half, all you succeed in getting are two magnets, each with a south and north pole. In recent years, however, the existence of monopoles, at least in the form of "quasiparticles" consisting of collective excitations among many atoms, has been predicted and demonstrated in the lab.

CU-Boulder-led team discovers new atmospheric compound tied to climate change, human health

An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Helsinki has discovered a surprising new chemical compound in Earth's atmosphere that reacts with sulfur dioxide to form sulfuric acid, which is known to have significant impacts on climate and health.

New phenomenon in nanodisk magnetic vortices

The phenomenon in ferromagnetic nanodisks of magnetic vortices– hurricanes of magnetism only a few atoms across – has generated intense interest in the high-tech community because of the potential application of these vortices in non-volatile Random Access Memory (RAM) data storage systems. New findings from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) indicate that the road to magnetic vortex RAM might be more difficult to navigate than previously supposed, but there might be unexpected rewards as well.

Unusual weather events identified during the Black Saturday bushfires

Research has revealed that the extremely hot, dry and windy conditions on Black Saturday combined with structures in the atmosphere called 'horizontal convective rolls' -similar to streamers of wind flowing through the air - which likely affected fire behaviour.

The study is the first of its kind to produce such detailed, high-resolution simulations of weather patterns on the day and provides insights for future fire management and warning systems.

A new global warming culprit: Dam drawdowns

Washington State University researchers have documented an under-appreciated group of players in global warming: dams, the water reservoirs behind them, and surges of greenhouse gases as water levels go up and down.

Planting the seeds of defense

Plants use a sophisticated series of defense mechanisms to restrict the growth of parasitic bacteria upon infection by stimulating various hormonal signals that trigger alterations in gene expression networks. The Salk findings and other recent studies suggest that these cellular defense responses engage the DNA methylation machinery to impart control over gene expression networks.

Diseased trees new source of climate gas

Diseased trees in forests may be a significant new source of methane that causes climate change, according to researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in Geophysical Research Letters.

Sixty trees sampled at Yale Myers Forest in northeastern Connecticut contained concentrations of methane that were as high as 80,000 times ambient levels. Normal air concentrations are less than 2 parts per million, but the Yale researchers found average levels of 15,000 parts per million inside trees.

California's hydroelectricity production is vulnerable to climate change

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — California's hydropower is vulnerable to climate change, a University of California, Riverside scientist has advised policymakers in "Our Changing Climate," a report released July 31 by the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission (CEC).

Higgs transition of north and south poles of electrons in a magnet

Minimal evidence of a Higgs transition 1 of north and south poles of electron spins was observed in a magnet Yb2Ti2O7 at the absolute temperature 2 0.21 K. A fractionalization of these monopoles from electron spins was observed on cooling to 0.3 K. On further cooling below 0.21 K, the material showed the ferromagnetism to be understood as a superconductivity of monopoles. The work is reported in an online science journal "Nature Communications" in UK on August 7, by an international collaboration team of Dr.