The retreat of Antarctica's fast-flowing Thwaites Glacier is expected to speed up within 20 years, once the glacier detaches from an underwater ridge that is currently holding it back, says a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.
Earth
Fears of global warming and its impact on our environment have left scientists scrambling to decrease levels of atmospheric carbon we humans produce. Now, Tel Aviv University researchers are doing their part to reduce humanity's carbon footprint by successfully growing forests in the most unlikely place — deep in Israel's Aravah Desert.
Washington, DC -- Solar radiation management is a class of theoretical concepts for manipulating the climate in order to reduce the risks of global warming caused by greenhouse gasses. But its potential effectiveness and risks are uncertain, and it is unclear whether tests could help narrow these uncertainties. A team composed of Caltech's Doug MacMynowski, Carnegie's Ken Caldeira and Ho-Jeong Shin, and Harvard's David Keith used modeling to determine the type of testing that might be effective in the future. Their work has been published online by Energy and Environmental Science.
NOAA researchers offer a novel explanation for why a type of Antarctic killer whale performs a rapid migration to warmer tropical waters in a paper published this month in the science journal Biology Letters. One tagged Antarctic killer whale monitored by satellite traveled over 5,000 miles to visit the warm waters off southern Brazil before returning immediately to Antarctica just 42 days later. This was the first long distance migration ever reported for killer whales.
Teenage survivors of a major earthquake experienced high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with girls and older students being the most severely affected, according to a study published in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing.
Researchers led by the West China School of Nursing and West China Hospital, Sichuan University, surveyed 1,976 young people aged from 12 to 20 years of age three months after the Wenchuan earthquake, focusing on the five most severely damaged secondary schools.
Significant increases in annual temperatures are having a devastating affect on glaciers in the mountainous regions of south-western China, potentially affecting natural habitats, tourism and wider economic development.
In a study published today, 25 October 2011, in IOP Publishing's Environmental Research Letters, scientists examined data from 111 weather stations across south-western China and have shown that temperature patterns were consistent with warming, at a statistically significant level, between 1961 and 2008.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The cataclysmic events that marked the end of the Permian Period some 252 million years ago were a watershed moment in the history of life on Earth. As much as 90 percent of ocean organisms were extinguished, ushering in a new order of marine species, some of which we still see today. But while land dwellers certainly sustained major losses, the extent of extinction and the reshuffling afterward were less clear.
In this week's PLoS Medicine, Justin Lessler of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA and colleagues describe a method that estimates the fraction of a population accessible to vaccination activities, and apply it to measles vaccination in three African countries: Ghana, Madagascar, and Sierra Leone. Their estimates can be used to identify countries where problems in vaccine delivery may exist, thereby providing important operational guidance on how to improve vaccine coverage.
In this week's PLoS Medicine, the PLoS Medicine editors reflect on recent research and analysis into rapid and convenient diagnostic tests for tuberculosis and HIV. They argue that while improving the speed and convenience of diagnostic tests is important, fully evaluating diagnostics remains critical to ensure that technical improvements are translated into improved health outcomes.
The Greenland ice sheet can experience extreme melting even when temperatures don't hit record highs, according to a new analysis by Dr. Marco Tedesco, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The City College of New York. His findings suggest that glaciers could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming that would be difficult to halt.
DALLAS (SMU) – New research from SMU's Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org, documents significant geothermal resources across the United States capable of producing more than three million megawatts of green power – 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants today.
Researchers studying how fluids travel through nanoscale channels were surprised to discover that the fluids don't flow equally well in all directions. Contrary to the behavior in the macroscale world, the researchers discovered that methyl alcohol, when it was placed in a network of nanoscale channels in a mineral known as a zeolite, diffused 1,000 times faster in one direction than another. This is the first known evidence of such highly unequal diffusion of molecules in a nanoporous material.
Pick your poison from this smorgasbord of recent salmonella outbreaks in the United States: ground turkey; fresh papayas; alfalfa sprouts. That's in 2011 alone, and the list goes on, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But perhaps not for long, thanks to a promising new biosensor nanotechnology that could identify the presence of salmonella bacteria before contaminated food or animals reach the marketplace.
Oxford -- In the latest issue of Elsevier's Materials Today, researchers from Spain and Belgium reported on the innovative use of carbon nanotubes to create mechanical components for use in a new generation of micro-machines. While the electronics industry has excelled in miniaturizing components, with individual elements approaching the nanoscale (or a billionth of a meter), reducing the size of mechanical systems has proved much more challenging.
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have succeeded in unraveling, for the first time, the complete chain of biochemical reactions that controls the synthesis of auxin, the hormone that regulates nearly all aspects of plant growth and development.
Their discovery, detailed in a paper in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will allow agricultural scientists to develop new ways to enhance or manipulate auxin production to improve the growth and yield of crops and other plants.