Earth

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---If a gay or bisexual man seeks sex or dating online, the type of partner or relationship he wants is a good indicator of whether he'll engage in safe sex, a new study suggests.

High-temperature superconductivity can be looked at as a fight for survival at the atomic scale. In an effort to reach that point where electrons pair up and resistance is reduced to zero, superconductivity must compete with numerous, seemingly rival phases of matter.

Understanding those phases and whether or not they are rivals or complementary phenomena has consumed the attention of theoreticians and experimentalists in the quest to find superconducting materials capable of functioning at close-to-room temperature, a potential that has gone unrealized for nearly three decades.

Earthquake scientists trying to unravel the mysteries of an unfelt, weeks-long seismic phenomenon called episodic tremor and slip have discovered a strange twist. The tremor can suddenly reverse direction and travel back through areas of the fault that it had ruptured in preceding days, and do so 20 to 40 times faster than the original fault rupture.

Rima Taher, an expert in the design of low-rise buildings for extreme winds and hurricanes, will speak next week at the Annual Conference of Construction Specifications Canada (Devis de Construction Canada) in Montreal. Taher, a university lecturer in NJIT's College of Architecture and Design, is a civil and structural engineer, http://www.njit.edu/news/experts/taher.php.

Researchers from the King Juan Carlos University (URJC) have carried out a research study published in Biological Conservation, which looked at whether spiders were more tolerant of human impact than other animals. The answer was no: arachnids suffer the consequences of changes to their landscape just like any other animal.

The University of Southampton is playing a key role in a major public/private partnership to evaluate the use of biomass to create a cost effective and sustainable UK energy system for 2050.

Domestic biomass (a renewable energy source from living, or recently living organisms, such as plants, rubbish and wood), sustainably grown in the UK, could provide up to 10 per cent (1) of the UK's energy needs by 2050 and significantly contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Los Angeles, CA (May 18, 2011) When people have power, they act the part. Powerful people smile less, interrupt others, and speak in a louder voice. When people do not respect the basic rules of social behavior, they lead others to believe that they have power, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).

PASADENA, Calif.—When the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake and resulting tsunami struck off the northeast coast of Japan on March 11, they caused widespread destruction and death. Using observations from a dense regional geodetic network (allowing measurements of earth movement to be gathered from GPS satellite data), globally distributed broadband seismographic networks, and open-ocean tsunami data, researchers have begun to construct numerous models that describe how the earth moved that day.

The ability to image single biological molecules in a living cell is something that has long eluded researchers; however, a novel technique, using the structure of diamond, may well be able to do this and potentially provide a tool for diagnosing, and eventually developing a treatment for, hard-to-cure diseases such as cancer.

Sam VanLaningham can't wait to take the Sikuliaq for a spin.

When it's ready for science operations in 2014, the 261-foot research vessel will be capable of drilling Bering Strait seafloor cores in any season. VanLaningham hopes those cores will uncover mysteries about the history of climate change in Alaska.

The inner core of the Earth is simultaneously melting and freezing due to circulation of heat in the overlying rocky mantle, according to new research from the University of Leeds, UC San Diego and the Indian Institute of Technology.

The findings, published tomorrow in Nature, could help us understand how the inner core formed and how the outer core acts as a 'geodynamo', which generates the planet's magnetic field.

Until a recent discovery, theories about the origins and evolutionary relationships of snakes barely had a leg to stand on.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), a scientific technique associated with outsized, very low temperature, superconducting magnets, is one of the principal tools in the chemist's arsenal, used to study everything from alcohols to proteins to such frontiers as quantum computing. In hospitals the machinery of NMR's cousin, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is as loud as it is big, but nevertheless a mainstay of diagnosis for a wide range of medical conditions.

Scientists from the University of Sheffield have developed pigment-free, intensely coloured polymer materials, which could provide new, anti-counterfeit devices on passports or banknotes due to their difficulty to copy.

The polymers do not use pigments but instead exhibit intense colour due to their structure, similar to the way nature creates colour for beetle shells and butterfly wings.

The mass extinction of marine life in our oceans during prehistoric times is a warning that the Earth will see such an extinction again because of high levels of greenhouse gases, according to new research by geologists.