Earth

By focusing proton beams using high-intensity lasers, a team of scientists have discovered a new way to heat material and create new states of matter in the laboratory.

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Hemoltz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf of Germany; Technische Universitat Darmstadt of Germany, and General Atomics of San Diego unveiled new findings about how proton beams can be used in myriad applications.

Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers who have adapted a three-dimensional, general circulation model of Earth's climate to a time some 2.8 billion years ago when the sun was significantly fainter than present think the planet may have been more prone to catastrophic glaciation than previously believed.

Australian scientists have discovered that some tropical fish have a greater capacity to cope with rising sea temperatures than previously thought – by adjusting over several generations.

The discovery, by researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University and CSIRO sheds a ray of hope amid the rising concern over the future of coral reefs and their fish under the levels of global warming expected to occur by the end of the 21st century.

Parasitic worms that infect fish, and have a devastating effect on fish reproduction, grow four times faster at higher temperatures – providing some of the first evidence that global warming affects the interactions between parasites and their hosts.

The study from the University of Leicester revealed that global warming had the potential to change the balance between parasite and host - with potentially serious implications for fish populations.

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA -- Findings from the most comprehensive assessment to date on climate change, snow and glacier melt in Asia's mountainous Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region -- site of Mount Everest and many of the world's tallest peaks -- highlight the region's extreme vulnerability to climate change, as rising temperatures disturb the balance of snow, ice and water, threatening millions of mountain people and 1.3 billion people living downstream in Asia's major river basins.

The end of the last ice age and the processes that led to the melting of the northern and southern ice sheets supply basic information on changes in our climate. Although the maximum size of the ice sheet in the northern hemisphere during the last ice age is relatively well known, there is little reliable data on the dimensions of the Antarctic ice sheet. A publication appearing in the journal Science on 1 December now furnishes indications that the two hemispheres attained their maximum ice sheet size at nearly the same time and started melting 19,000 years ago.