U.S. Forest Service scientists have found that prescribed fires with the heat insulation of leaf litter and soil can help restore oak ecosystems.
Forest Service researchers are helping land managers find the best time to use prescribed fire when oak regeneration from acorns is a concern.
It's summer. For many of us, summer is a time synonymous with fresh corn, one of the major field crops produced in the United States.
In 2011, corn was planted on more than 92 million acres in the U.S., helping the nation continue its trend as the world's largest exporter of the crop.
Corn is a nitrogen-loving plant. To achieve desired production levels, most U.S. farmers apply synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to their fields every year.
In this week's PLoS Medicine, Joseph Tucker from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA and colleagues lay out a social entrepreneurship for sexual health (SESH) approach that focuses on decentralized community delivery, multisectoral networks, and horizontal collaboration (business, technology, and academia).
An international research team has created synthetic pores that mimic the activity of cellular ion channels, which play a vital role in human health by severely restricting the types of materials allowed to enter cells.
The pores the scientists built are permeable to potassium ions and water, but not to other ions such as sodium and lithium ions.
This kind of extreme selectivity, while prominent in nature, is unprecedented for a synthetic structure, said University at Buffalo chemistry professor Bing Gong, PhD, who led the study.
Hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element on Earth, is a promising energy carrier for emerging clean energy technology. Hydrogen is the energy carrier that powers fuel cells in electric cars, and can be used to store energy generated by renewable sources at times of low demand.
A major challenge with hydrogen energy is meeting the dual goals of high storage density and efficient kinetics for hydrogen release when it is needed.
The lunar surface is marred by impact craters, remnants of the collisions that have occurred over the past 4.5 billion years. The Orientale basin, the Moon's most recently formed sizable crater, stands out from the rest.
Radio tracking revealed a surprising finding: when the rodents dig up the seeds, they usually do not eat them, but instead move them to a new site and bury them, often many times. One seed in the study was moved 36 times, traveling a total distance of 749 meters and ending up 280 meters from its starting point. It was ultimately retrieved and eaten by an agouti 209 days after initial dispersal.
There's no honor among thieves when it comes to rodent robbers—which turns out to be a good thing for tropical trees that depend on animals to spread their seeds.
Results of a yearlong study in Panama, published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of July 16, suggest that thieving rodents helped the black palm tree survive by taking over the seed-spreading role of the mighty mastodon and other extinct elephant-like creatures that are thought to have eaten these large seeds.
Cambridge, Mass. - July 16, 2012 - Harvard-led researchers have discovered that an Ascomycete fungus that is common in polluted water produces environmentally important minerals during asexual reproduction.
The key chemical in the process, superoxide, is a byproduct of fungal growth when the organism produces spores. Once released into the environment, superoxide reacts with the element manganese (Mn), producing a highly reactive mineral that aids in the cleanup of toxic metals, degrades carbon substrates, and controls the bioavailability of nutrients.
New research by Columbia Engineering demonstrates remarkable optical nonlinear behavior of graphene that may lead to broad applications in optical interconnects and low-power photonic integrated circuits. With the placement of a sheet of graphene just one-carbon-atom-thick, the researchers transformed the originally passive device into an active one that generated microwave photonic signals and performed parametric wavelength conversion at telecommunication wavelengths.
The mystery of the origin of matter seems to have been solved. At the middle of last week, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, announced the discovery of a new particle that could be the long sought-after Higgs boson. The particle has a mass of about 126 gigaelectron volts (GeV), roughly that of 126 protons. "Almost half a century has passed since the existence of the Higgs boson was first postulated and now it seems that we at last have the evidence we have been looking for.
Boulder, Colo., USA – Geology highlights include understanding new evidence for rock pulverization by catastrophic events near major faults in California and Japan; modern-day examples of active arc-continent collision in Taiwan; discovery and study of the highest-latitude coral reefs presently known on Earth, located in Japan; the puzzling record of the changing isotope ratio of calcium in seawater over the last 500 million years; and a possible refutation of hypotheses concerning shallow-water methane seep fauna.
Fire in enclosed military environments such as ship holds, aircraft cockpits and ground vehicles is a major cause of material destruction and jeopardizes the lives of warfighters. For example, a shipboard fire on the aircraft carrier USS George Washington in May 2008 burned for 12 hours and caused an estimated $70 million in damage. For nearly 50 years, despite the severity of the threat from fire, no new methods for extinguishing or manipulating fire were developed.
Wolverines live in harsh conditions; they range over large areas of cold mountainous low-productivity habitat with persistent snow. The paper suggests wolverines take advantage of the crevices and boulders of the mountainous terrain, as well as the snow cover to cache and "refrigerate" food sources such as elk, caribou, moose and mountain goat carrion, ground squirrels and other food collected during more plentiful times of year. These cold, structured chambers provide protection of the food supply from scavengers, insects and bacteria.