They were called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Until the late 19th century, New Zealand's Pink and White Terraces along Lake Rotomahana on the North Island, attracted tourists from around the world, interested in seeing the beautiful natural formations created by a large geothermal system. But the eruption of Mt. Tarawera on June 10, 1886, buried the terraces in sediment and caused the lake basin to enlarge, engulfing the land where the terraces stood. For more than a century, people have speculated whether any part of the Pink and White Terraces survived the eruption.
Earth
BOULDER--The aggressive wolverine may not be powerful enough to survive climate change in the contiguous United States, new research concludes.
ITHACA, N.Y. – Growing up poor increases a person's likelihood of health problems as an adult, but a new study led by a Cornell University environmental psychologist shows that being raised in a tight-knit community can help offset this disadvantage of poverty.
Failure to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions effectively has led to intensifying debate on geoengineering - deliberate large-scale schemes to slow the rate at which Earth is heating up. The public debate often mixes opinion with fact so scientists have now released the first summary for policymakers on ocean fertilization, one of the earliest geoengineering proposals. The authors report that the chances of success of using ocean fertilization to deal with climate change is low.
Ecology drives evolution. In today's issue of the journal Science, UC Davis expert Thomas Schoener describes growing evidence that the reverse is also true, and explores what that might mean to our understanding of how environmental change affects species and vice-versa.
University of Alberta researchers determined that a fossilized dinosaur bone found in New Mexico confounds the long established paradigm that the age of dinosaurs ended between 65.5 and 66 million years ago.
The U of A team, led by Larry Heaman from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, determined the femur bone of a hadrosaur as being only 64.8 million years old. That means this particular plant eater was alive about 700,000 years after the mass extinction event many paleontologists believe wiped all non-avian dinosaurs off the face of earth, forever.
The first large-scale, physics-based space weather prediction model is transitioning from research into operation.
The temperature of water situated in the subtropical Atlantic experienced a drop of 0.15ºC between 1998 and 2006. This has been revealed by a study led by the IEO (Spanish Oceanography Institute) which suggests that circulation caused by wind could be responsible for this "unusual" behaviour.
In this week's PLoS Medicine, Ian Sinha and colleagues from the Institute of Child Health, University of Liverpool, UK, make recommendations for the development of core outcome sets for clinical trials, based upon a review of the literature. They advise that when using the Delphi process to develop core outcome sets for clinical trials, patients and clinicians should be involved, researchers and facilitators should avoid imposing their views on participants, and the attrition of participants must be minimized.
Washington, D.C. (January 25, 2011) -- In a development that may revolutionize handheld electronics, flat-panel displays, touch panels, electronic ink, and solar cells, as well as drastically reduce their manufacturing costs, physicists in Iran have created a spintronic device based on "armchair" graphene nanoribbons. Spintronic devices are being pursued by the semiconductor and electronics industries because they promise to be smaller, more versatile, and much faster than today's electronics.
Washington, D.C. (January 25, 2011) -- A team of physicists has taken a big step toward the development of useful graphene spintronic devices. The physicists, from the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Science and Technology of China, present their findings in the American Institute of Physics' Applied Physics Letters.
Measuring the attractive forces between atoms and surfaces with unprecedented precision, University of Arizona physicists have produced data that could refine our understanding of the structure of atoms and improve nanotechnology. The discovery has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
There is considerable interest in understanding transport and information pathways in living cells. It is crucial for both the transport of, for example, medicine into cells, the regulation of cell life processes and their signalling with their environment. New research in biophysics at the Niels Bohr Institute shows surprisingly that the transport mechanisms do not follow the expected pattern. The results have been published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
CHESTNUT HILL, MA (1/25/11) -- Researchers from Boston College, MIT, Clemson and Virginia have used nanotechnology to achieve a 60-90 percent increase in the thermoelectric figure of merit of p-type half-Heusler, a common bulk semiconductor compound, the team reported in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.