CAIRNS, Australia and STANFORD, California – 9 July 2012 -- Like their warrior ancestors, leaders of many Pacific Island nations have been making efforts to safeguard their countries, this time by sounding an alarm as the impact of climate change becomes more apparent.
Earth
A Duke University study of well water in northeastern Pennsylvania suggests that naturally occurring pathways could have allowed salts and gases from the Marcellus shale formation deep underground to migrate up into shallow drinking water aquifers.
The study found elevated levels of salinity with similar geochemistry to deep Marcellus brine in drinking water samples from three groundwater aquifers, but no direct links between the salinity and shale gas exploration in the region.
Marine scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have linked the decline in growth of Caribbean forereef corals — due to recent warming — to long-term trends in seawater temperature experienced by these corals located on the ocean-side of the reef. The research was conducted on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System in southern Belize.
The results were revealed online in the July 8 issue of Nature Climate Change, a journal that publishes research on the impacts of global climate change and its implications for the economy, policy and the world at large.
Alexandria, VA – Resting in the Karakoram Range between northern Pakistan and western China, the Karakoram glaciers are stumping climate scientists and Associated Press journalists declaring a localized heat wave is proof of global warming.
Unlike many mountain glaciers, the Karakoram glaciers, which account for 3 percent of the total ice-covered area in the world outside Greenland and Antarctica, are not shrinking.
Satellite measurements show that nitrogen dioxide in the lower atmosphere over parts of Europe and the US has fallen over the past decade. More than 15 years of atmospheric observations have revealed trends in air quality.
As the world's population increases, economies in many countries are also growing and populations are concentrating in large cities. With the use of fossil fuels still on the rise, pollution in large cities is also increasing.Nitrogen dioxide is an important pollutant in the troposphere, the lowest portion of our atmosphere.
An international team that includes scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings. Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC.
AMHERST, Mass. – Physicists Benjamin Brau, Carlo Dallapiccola and Stephane Willocq at the University of Massachusetts Amherst were instrumental in this week's preliminary observation of a new particle, possibly the long-sought Higgs boson, announced by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) particle physics laboratory.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- University at Buffalo physicists are among researchers engaged in one of modern history's most exciting scientific endeavors: The hunt for the elusive Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that could help explain why objects have mass.
The particle is the last particle in the Standard Model of particle physics that scientists have yet to observe conclusively. If discovered, the Higgs boson would help validate the model, which describes how particles and forces interact with one another. The model enables physicists to describe how the world around us works.
Lyding and graduate student Scott Schmucker purchased an inexpensive ion gun and tested Lyding's idea. It worked beautifully. STM tips with a starting radius of 100 nanometers were honed to a sharp 1-nanometer point, yielding extremely high resolution. In addition, the sputtering process works with any electrically conductive material.
On this July 4th week, U.S. beachgoers are thronging their way to seaside resorts and parks to celebrate with holiday fireworks.
Across the horizon and miles out to sea toward the north, the Atlantic Ocean's own spring and summer ritual is unfolding: the blooming of countless microscopic plant plankton, or phytoplankton.
In what's known as the North Atlantic Bloom, an immense number of phytoplankton burst into color, first "greening" then "whitening" the sea as one species follows another.
July 4, 2012, was an historic day in science with researchers at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) announcing the discovery of a new particle that is "consistent with the Higgs boson." It was also an historic day for the University of Rochester. Not only was one of its faculty members an originator of the theory for the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs boson, three of its scientists worked on one of the experiments that led to the CERN discovery.
PASADENA, Calif.—Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, have discovered a new particle that may be the long-sought Higgs boson, the fundamental particle that is thought to endow elementary particles with mass.
"This is a momentous time in the history of particle physics and in scientific exploration—the implications are profound," says Harvey Newman, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). "This is experimental science at its best."
Cambridge, Mass. - July 6, 2012 - Atmospheric scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Nanjing University have produced the first "bottom-up" estimates of China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, for 2005 to 2009, and the first statistically rigorous estimates of the uncertainties surrounding China's CO2 emissions.
Professor Ian Simmonds from the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences co-authored the study and said the new information showed this combined effect at both ground and atmospheric level played a key role in increasing the rate of warming in the Arctic.
"Loss of sea ice contributes to ground level warming while global warming intensifies atmospheric circulation and contributes to increased temperatures higher in the Arctic atmosphere," Professor Simmonds said.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Physicists on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory on the border of Switzerland and France, announced yesterday (July 4) that they have observed a new particle.