Ocean acidification, a consequence of climate change, could weaken the shells of California mussels and diminish their body mass, with serious implications for coastal ecosystems, UC Davis researchers will report July 15 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
California mussels (Mytilus californianus) live in beds along the western coast of the United States from Alaska to California. More than 300 other species share the beds or depend on the mussels in some way.
Until recently, migration patterns, such as those adopted by birds all across the Amazonian rainforest, have not been thought to play an important role in the spreading of beneficial genes through a population.
Researchers have now, for the first time, been able to predict the chance of a gene spreading when given any migration pattern, potentially providing an insight into the migration patterns of animals throughout history.
A FRAMEWORK FOR K-12 SCIENCE EDUCATION, new from the National Research Council, identifies the key scientific concepts and practices that all students in these grades should learn. The framework offers a new vision for K-12 education in science and engineering and embodies a significant shift in how these subjects are viewed and taught.
It will serve as the basis for new science education standards, to replace those last issued over a decade ago, and will inform the work of curriculum and assessment developers, teacher educators, and researchers.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- At an atomic scale, the tiniest bridge of gold -- that made of a single atom -- is actually the strongest, according to new research by engineers at the University at Buffalo's Laboratory for Quantum Devices.
The counterintuitive finding is the result of experiments probing the characteristics of atomic-scale necks of gold that formed when the pointed, gold tip of a cantilever was pushed into a flat, gold surface. An examination of these tiny, gold bridges revealed that they were stiffest when they comprised just a single atom.
Seattle – Rice – which provides nearly half the daily calories for the world's population – could become adapted to climate change and some catastrophic events by colonizing its seeds or plants with the spores of tiny naturally occurring fungi, just-published U.S. Geological Survey-led research shows.
More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes soil to release the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, new research published in this week's edition of Nature reveals. "This feedback to our changing atmosphere means that nature is not as efficient in slowing global warming as we previously thought," said Dr Kees Jan van Groenigen, Research Fellow at the Botany department at the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, and lead author of the study.
A custom-built, $2.5 million "split magnet" system with the potential to revolutionize scientific research in a variety of fields has made its debut at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University.
The extended Coulomb failure stress (ECFS) criteria and anisotropic porosity and permeability tensor at micro/meso/macro scale under ultra‑high temperature and pressure (UTP) conditions were developed employing the flow driven pore‑network crack (FDPNC) model under multiple temporal–spatial scales and the hybrid hypersingular integral equation‑lattice Boltzmann method (HHIE‑LBM). The correlation of the Zipingpu reservoir and Longmenshan slip was then analyzed and the fluid–solid coupled three‑dimensional facture mechanism of the reservoir and earthquake fault was explored.
New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are still America's largest metropolitan areas, but none of the nation's 366 metropolitan areas added more people during the past decade than Houston. Based on a new extensive analysis of the 2000 and 2010 censuses by Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, the Greater Houston metropolitan area grew by a whopping 1.2 million people and increased by more than 123,000 per year over the decade.
What looks like a spongy ball wrapped in strands of yarn -- but a lot smaller -- could be key to unlocking better methods for catalysis, artificial photosynthesis or splitting water into hydrogen, according to Rice University chemists who have created a platform to analyze interactions between carbon nanotubes and a wide range of photoluminescent materials.
Ohio State University researchers are leveraging powerful supercomputers to investigate one of the key observational probes of "dark energy," the mysterious energy form that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate over time.
Sepiolite is a lightweight porous mineral used in cat litter and other applications. The extraordinary properties of this clay make it a highly sought after mineral, despite its scarcity in the Earth's crust: only a few mines worldwide extract it, several of them clustered near Madrid in Spain, the world's biggest exporter of this material.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Earthquakes and volcanoes are known for their ability to transform Earth's surface, but new research in the Caribbean has found they can also move ancient Earth rock foundations more than 1,000 miles.
07/07/11, Clearwater Beach, FL. Research to be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, may explain why some antipsychotic drugs can promote overeating, weight gain, and insulin resistance.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe, why nature favored matter over antimatter at the universe's creation.
Positronium is made up of an electron and its antimatter twin, the positron. It has applications in developing more accurate Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans and in fundamental physics research.