Stress in the second and third months of pregnancy can shorten pregnancies, increase the risk of pre-term births and may affect the ratio of boys to girls being born, leading to a decline in male babies. These are the conclusions of a study that investigated the effect on pregnant women of the stress caused by the 2005 Tarapaca earthquake in Chile.
Earth
A team of scientists, led by Guillaume Gervais from McGill's Physics Department and Mike Lilly from Sandia National Laboratories, has engineered one of the world's smallest electronic circuits. It is formed by two wires separated by only about 150 atoms or 15 nanometers (nm). This discovery, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could have a significant effect on the speed and power of the ever smaller integrated circuits of the future in everything from smartphones to desktop computers, televisions and GPS systems.
In another illustration of the contributions older people make to society, an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) describes how older scientists are winning Nobel prizes more often these days than in the past. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
Engineering scientists at the University of Southampton are flying the world's first fully rapid prototyped air vehicle this week, to help develop new technologies that probe the Earth's atmosphere using an unmanned platform.
The vehicle is part of the ASTRA (Atmospheric Science Through Robotic Aircraft) project, and it aims to demonstrate how a low-cost, bespoke high altitude platform could be developed and manufactured over a period of mere days and used to send a payload with atmospheric monitoring equipment into the upper atmosphere.
Glass fiber cables are indispensable for the internet – now they can also be used as a quantum physics lab. The Vienna University of Technology is the only research facility in the world, where single atoms can be controllably coupled to the light in ultra-thin fiber glass. Specially prepared light waves interact with very small numbers of atoms, which makes it possible to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to tiny trace amounts of a substance.
Computer scientists at UC San Diego, who set out to simulate all rainbows found in nature, wound up answering questions about the physics of rainbows as well. The scientists recreated a wide variety of rainbows – primary rainbows, secondary rainbows, redbows that form at sunset and cloudbows that form on foggy days – by using an improved method for simulating how light interacts with water drops of various shapes and sizes. Their new approach even yielded realistic simulations of difficult-to-replicate "twinned" rainbows that split their primary bow in two.
Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have set a new record for the calculation of scattering amplitudes. This kind of calculation is used to predict the outcome of accelerator experiments in which high-energy particles collide with one another. However, the calculations become increasingly difficult the greater the number of orders the physicists wish to calculate. Professor Dr. Stefan Weinzierl's work group has now developed an algorithm which is far faster and requires less computing capacity than other algorithms.
With news this week of additional radioactive leaks from Fukushima nuclear power plants, the impact on the ocean of releases of radioactivity from the plants remains unclear. But a new study by U.S. and Japanese researchers analyzes the levels of radioactivity discharged from the facility in the first four months after the accident and draws some basic conclusions about the history of contaminant releases to the ocean.
At the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, when Canadians roared with delight at a medal haul that placed the country at an "all-time, all-nation Winter Olympics record of 14 gold medals," athletes did more than win gold–they fired up exuberant displays of national pride and unity across the country.
And new research involving the University of Alberta suggests Canadians are willing to pay to get them.
Plants' and animals' seasonal cycles, such as flowering dates and migration patterns, have shifted in recent decades due to climate change.
Now a new study seems to indicate that some human weather-related behavior also is being influenced by global warming.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found peak attendance in U.S. national parks that have experienced climate change is happening earlier, compared to 30 years ago.
Scientists have developed important new insight into the sensitivity of global temperature to changes in the Earth's radiation balance over the last half million years.
The sensitivity of global temperature to changes in the Earth's radiation balance (climate sensitivity) is a key parameter for understanding past natural climate changes as well as potential future climate change.
Scientists have shown the energy conditions, under which a weak signal supplied to a physical system emerges as a stronger signal at the output thanks to the presence of random noise (a process known as stochastic resonance), in a paper that has just been published in EPJ B¹.
Stochastic resonance goes against the intuitive idea that where noise is present, the signal tends to fade. It occurs in systems where the response is not proportional to the applied input signal, known as nonlinear systems.
Global carbon dioxide emissions increased by a record 5.9 per cent in 2010 following the dampening effect of the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), according to scientists working with the Global Carbon Project.
The Global Carbon Project (GCP) published its annual analysis in the journal Nature Climate Change, reporting that the impact of the GFC on emissions has been short-lived owing to strong emissions growth in emerging economies and a return to emissions growth in developed economies.
Researchers have added further clarity to the global climate trend, proving that global warming is showing no signs of slowing down and that further increases are to be expected in the next few decades.
They revealed the true global warming trend by bringing together and analysing the five leading global temperature data sets, covering the period from 1979 to 2010, and factoring out three of the main factors that account for short-term fluctuations in global temperature: El Niño, volcanic eruptions and variations in the Sun's brightness.
SAN FRANCISCO – Researchers have discovered that the destructive tsunami generated by the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was a long-hypothesized "merging tsunami" that doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its destructive power before reaching shore.