PHILADELPHIA (February 20, 2012) — Drexel engineers have found a way to improve upon ordinary Portland cement (OPC), the glue that's bonded much of the world's construction since the late 1800s. In research recently published in Cement and Concrete Composites the group served up a recipe for cement that is more energy efficient and cost effective to produce than masonry's most prevalent bonding compound.
Earth
Alexandria, VA – Throughout the Zamfara region in northwestern Nigeria, children are dying at an alarming rate. What exactly could be causing such an epidemic? The answer lies in the unique geology.
Lead-rich gold ores permeate the area, and mining them provides critical income for many families in need. Families get by on small-scale artisanal level mining, which, in turn, exposes them to lead poisoning. With the rising value of gold, villagers must weigh the socioeconomic impacts against the lethal health repercussions.
Human activity is likely a greater threat to coastal groundwater used for drinking water supplies than rising sea levels from climate change, according to a study conducted by geoscientists from the University of Saskatchewan and McGill University in Montreal.
New clues as to how the Earth's remote ecosystems have been influenced by the Industrial Revolution are frozen in glaciers, according to a paper in the March issue of Nature Geoscience.
"Remote regions are often perceived as being pristine and devoid of human influence," said Aron Stubbins, the study's lead author and an assistant professor at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. "Glaciers show us that burning fuels has an impact upon the natural functioning of ecosystems far removed from industrial activity."
Thawing permafrost will have far-reaching ramifications for populated areas, infrastructure and ecosystems. A geographer from the University of Zurich reveals where it is important to confront the issue based on new permafrost maps -- the most precise global maps around. They depict the global distribution of permafrost in high-resolution images and are available on Google Earth.
VANCOUVER, CANADA - Over the decades X-ray crystallography has been fundamental in the development of many scientific fields. The method has revealed the structure and function of many biological molecules, including vitamins, drugs, proteins and nucleic acids such as DNA. However, in order to obtain good data, large single crystals are required. These are often nearly impossible to grow. There also is the problem that X-rays damage delicate biological samples.
PHILADELPHIA — Pompeii-like, a 300-million-year-old tropical forest was preserved in ash when a volcano erupted in what is today northern China. A new study by University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn and colleagues presents a reconstruction of this fossilized forest, lending insight into the ecology and climate of its time.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Geologists are hoping to learn a great deal about geologic carbon sequestration from injecting 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into sandstone 7,000 feet beneath Decatur, Ill. And they're hoping the public learns a lot from the endeavor, too.
Dilute magnetic semiconductors (DMS) have recently been a major focus of magnetic semiconductor research. A laboratory from the University of Science and Technology of China explored the feasibility of doping manganese (Mn) into zinc sulfide (ZnS) to obtain magnetic semiconductors.
In a remarkable feat of micro-engineering, UNSW physicists have created a working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal.
The tiny electronic device, described today in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, uses as its active component an individual phosphorus atom patterned between atomic-scale electrodes and electrostatic control gates.
This unprecedented atomic accuracy may yield the elementary building block for a future quantum computer with unparalleled computational efficiency.
New clues as to how the Earth's remote ecosystems have been influenced by the industrial revolution are locked, frozen in the ice of glaciers. That is the finding of a group of scientists, including Robert Spencer of the Woods Hole Research Center. The research will be published in the March 2012 issue of Nature Geoscience.
Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a new method for chemically altering graphene, a development that could be a step toward the creation of faster, thinner, flexible electronics.
The past decade has witnessed a significant growth in Asian air pollution, causing a great concern for air quality and climate. If government policy makers hope to contain the problem, they will need increased research and better computer models of black carbon and other aerosol pollutants, also known as atmospheric brown cloud (ABC), according to University of Iowa engineering professor Gregory Carmichael.
Landscape fire smoke contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, new research suggests
Worldwide, smoke from landscape fires contributed to an average of 339,000 deaths per year between 1997 and 2006, according to new research published in Environmental Health Perspectives and released today during the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Vancouver, B.C. (Wednesday, February 15, 2012) – In 1997, a forest fire in Indonesia ignited an area of peatlands that smouldered for months. By the time it was over, the fire had released greenhouse gases equal to 20 to 40 percent of the total worldwide emissions that year from fossil fuels.
But that could be a drop in the bucket compared to future emissions from peat fires. Indonesian peatlands are dwarfed by Canada's. The total area of all peatland in Canada is estimated to be about twice the size of Saskatchewan.