The Cambrian "explosion" of multicellular animal life is one of the most significant evolutionary events in Earth's history. But what was it that jolted the Earth system enough to prompt the evolution of animals? While we take the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere for granted, it was not always this way.
Earth
COLUMBIA, Mo. – A prolific University of Missouri chemist has discovered a quicker and easier method for pharmaceutical companies to make certain drugs.
Jerry Atwood, Curator's Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemistry in the MU College of Arts and Science, has recently published a paper – his 663rd in a refereed journal – that states that highly pressurized carbon dioxide at room temperature could replace the time consuming and expensive methods currently used to manufacture certain pharmaceutical drugs.
University Park, Pa. -- Crabs, fishing, land use and pollution sources are frequently hot topics for researchers in the Chesapeake Bay area, but finding all the available information, especially remote sensing data, is frequently a chore. Now, ChesapeakeView, a project of the AmericaView consortium, brings together a variety of datasets and makes them available to anyone who needs them for research, planning or other studies.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Precision measurement in the world of nanoparticles has now become a possibility, thanks to scientists at UC Santa Barbara.
The UCSB research team has developed a new instrument capable of detecting individual nanoparticles with diameters as small as a few tens of nanometers. The study will be published on line this week by Nature Nanotechnology, and appear in the April print issue of the journal.
When a Rhode-Island-sized ice chunk separates from Greenland, is the calving due to typical seasonal variations or a long-term warmer world? A project called the Scalable, Efficient, and Accurate Community Ice Sheet Model, or SEACISM, on the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, aims to use state-of-the-art simulation to predict the behavior of ice sheets under a changing climate.
Seismologists have developed a new system that could be used to warn future populations of an impending tsunami only minutes after the initial earthquake. The system, known as RTerg, could help reduce the death toll by giving local residents valuable time to move to safer ground. The study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology appears in the March 5 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.
Ongoing climate-driven changes to the Arctic sea-ice could have a significant impact on the blooming of tiny planktonic plants (phytoplankton) with important implications for the Arctic ecosystem, according to new research conducted by scientists at the UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
"Ice-edge phytoplankton blooms in the Arctic Ocean provide food for planktonic animals called zooplankton, which are in turn exploited by animals higher up the food chain such as fish," explained Dr Andrew Yool, one of the team of NOC researchers.
Biologically targeted BNCT treatment is based on producing radiation inside a tumour usingboron-10 and thermal neutrons. Boron-10 is introduced into cancer cells with the help of a special carrier substance (phenylalanine), after which the tumour is irradiated with lowenergy neutrons. The latter react with the boron to generate high-LET radiation, which may destroy the cancer cells. One to two BNCT treatment sessions may be sufficient to destroy a tumour, while keeping the impact of radiation on surrounding healthy tissue to a minimum.
Graphene – a sheet of carbon atoms linked in a hexagonal, chicken wire structure – holds great promise for microelectronics. Only one atom thick and highly conductive, graphene may one day replace conventional silicon microchips, making devices smaller, faster and more energy-efficient.
In addition to potential applications in integrated circuits, solar cells, miniaturized bio devices and gas molecule sensors, the material has attracted the attention of physicists for its unique properties in conducting electricity on an atomic level.
RICHLAND, Wash. – In some cases, soot – the fine, black carbon silt that is released from stoves, cars and manufacturing plants – can pack more of a climatic punch than greenhouse gases, according to a paper published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Researchers already study how various species of plants and animals migrate in response to climate change. Now, Jason Samson, a PhD candidate in McGill University's Department of Natural Resource Sciences, has taken the innovative step of using the same analytic tools to measure the impact of climate change on human populations. Samson and fellow researchers combined climate change data with censuses covering close to 97 per-cent of the world's population in order to forecast potential changes in local populations for 2050.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- As carbon dioxide levels have risen during the last 150 years, the density of pores that allow plants to breathe has dwindled by 34 percent, restricting the amount of water vapor the plants release to the atmosphere, report scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and Utrecht University in the Netherlands in an upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (now online).
Our earliest ancestors preferred to settle in locations that have something in common with cities such as San Francisco, Naples and Istanbul -- they are often on active tectonic faults in areas that have an earthquake risk or volcanoes, or both.