VANCOUVER -- Indigenous people around the world are among the most vulnerable to climate change and are increasingly susceptible to the pathogen loads found in potable water after heavy rainfall or rapid snow melt.
These are the preliminary findings of Sherilee Harper, a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Aboriginal People's Health at the University of Guelph, who says that there has been a significant increase in the incidence of diarrhea and vomiting following these weather events.
Phytoplankton Key to a Healthy Planet says Canada Research Chair at the Forefront of Phytoplankton Research
Maria (Maite) Maldonado, Canada Research Chair in Phytoplankton Trace Metal Physiology at The University of British Columbia, has made understanding the intricacies of marine phytoplankton her life's work. These tiny, single-celled algae, which act as a natural sponge for carbon dioxide and are a critical part of the global carbon cycle, may play a key role in ensuring the health of the planet.
Researchers from the University of York are pioneering the development of electron microscopes which will allow scientists to examine a greater variety of materials in new revolutionary ways.
The team, headed by Professor Jun Yuan and Professor Mohamed Babiker, from the University's Department of Physics has created electron beams with orbital angular momentum – electron vortex beams – which will open the way to many novel applications including the more efficient examining of magnetic materials.
Vancouver, B.C. — February 15, 2012 — We are on the cusp of a new information revolution — a quantum leap in technology — and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo is leading the way. With the world's largest concentration of researchers working to harness the forces of quantum mechanics, the institute stands to transform computing, communications and other technologies.
Ghost imaging (GI), and its even more oddly named cousin virtual ghost imaging (VGI), seem to contradict conventional wisdom by being able to image an object by simply counting photons in a "light bucket." This non-intuitive technique, however, can lead to better images when conditions are less than ideal. In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, a team of researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md., and the University of Maryland in Baltimore, captured reflected photons from a highly specialized laser beam to create a VGI image of a remote target.
"Perhaps the earliest public demonstration of an electric motor," writes a team of researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, "involved the automatic rotation of a turkey on a spit over a fire" at a party put on by Benjamin Franklin in 1749. Franklin's electrostatic motor was self-commutating, meaning that it was able to provide a continuous torque while it turned without requiring external electronics to control its progress.
By adding an incredibly thin coating of alumina to a metal surface, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have doubled the rate that heat travels from a solid surface – such as a pot on a stove – into the liquid in the pot. The results are published in the American Institute of Physics' journal Applied Physics Letters.
Does it matter whether long periods of hot weather, such as last year's heat wave that gripped the U.S. Midwest, happen in June or July, August or September?
Scientists studying the subtle effects of heat waves and droughts say that when such events happen makes a big difference.
Like a stream of air shooting out of an airplane's broken window to relieve cabin pressure, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego say lava formations in eastern Oregon are the result of an outpouring of magma forced out of a breach in a massive slab of Earth. Their new mechanism explaining how such a large volume of magma was generated is published in the Feb. 16 issue of the journal Nature.
PASADENA, Calif.—January saw the biggest solar storm since 2005, generating some of the most dazzling northern lights in recent memory.
LIVERMORE, Calif. --Extreme summer temperatures are already occurring more frequently in the United States, and will become normal by mid-century if the world continues on a business as usual schedule of emitting greenhouse gases.
By analyzing observations and results obtained from climate models, a study led by Phil Duffy of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showed that previously rare high summertime (June, July and August) temperatures are already occurring more frequently in some regions of the 48 contiguous United States.
More than 1 in 3 counties in the United States could face a "high" or "extreme" risk of water shortages due to climate change by the middle of the 21st century, according to a new study in ACS's Journal of Environmental Science & Technology. The new report concluded that 7 in 10 of the more than 3,100 U.S. counties could face "some" risk of shortages of fresh water for drinking, farming and other uses. It includes maps that identify the counties at risk of shortages.
Bohdan Nosyk and Julio Montaner of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in Vancouver, Canada argue in an Essay published in this week's PLoS Medicine that the cost-effectiveness of HAART roll out has been significantly underestimated, because economic analyses have not yet taken into account the beneficial impact of HAART on prevention of HIV transmission.
The models used to understand how Earth's climate works include thousands of different variables from many scientific including atmospherics, oceanography, seismology, geology, physics and chemistry, but few take into consideration the vast effect that microbes have on climate. Now, a new report from the American Academy of Microbiology, "Incorporating Microbial Processes into Climate Models", offers a plan for integrating the latest understanding of the science of microbiology into climate models.
Arizona State University researchers are finding ways to improve infrared photodetector technology that is critical to national defense and security systems, as well as used increasingly in commercial applications and consumer products.
A significant advance is reported in a recent article in the journal Applied Physics Letters. It details discovery of how infrared photodetection can be done more effectively by using certain materials arranged in specific patterns in atomic-scale structures.