Chemists at UC San Diego have uncovered a new chemical reaction on tiny particulates in the atmosphere that could allow scientists to gain a glimpse from ancient rocks of what the atmospheres of the Earth and Mars were like hundreds of millions years ago.
Their discovery also provides a simple chemical explanation for the unusual carbonate inclusions found in a meteorite from Mars that was once thought by some scientists to be evidence of ancient Martian life.
Glaciers of large mountain regions contribute, to some extent considerably, to the water supply of certain populated areas. However, in a recent study conducted by Innsbruck glaciologists and climatologists it has been shown that there are important regional differences. The results of the study are published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
SANTA CRUZ, CA--A team of marine scientists has found that toxin-producing algae once thought to be limited to coastal waters are also common in the open ocean, where the addition of iron from natural or artificial sources can stimulate rapid growth of the harmful algae. The new findings, reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, add to concerns about proposals to use iron fertilization of the oceans as a way to combat global warming.
Geneva, 8 November 2010. Four days is all it took for the LHC operations team at CERN* to complete the transition from protons to lead ions in the LHC. After extracting the final proton beam of 2010 on 4 November, commissioning the lead-ion beam was underway by early afternoon. First collisions were recorded at 00:30 CET on 7 November, and stable running conditions marked the start of physics with heavy ions at 11:20 CET today.
Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have succeeded in storing quantum information using two 'entangled' light beams. Quantum memory or information storage is a necessary element of future quantum communication networks. The new findings are published in Nature Physics.
The best developed approach for practical fusion energy employs magnetic bottles to hold and isolate extremely hot plasmas inside a vacuum vessel. Using magnetic fields for thermal insulation has proven quite effective, allowing plasma temperatures in excess of 100 million C to be attained - conditions under which the nuclei fuse and release energy. The tokamak device, a torus or donut-shaped magnetic bottle, has been found to perform particularly well and is the basis for ITER, a full-scale international fusion experiment presently under construction in France with U.S. participation.
Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have successfully used Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI) to generate plasma current and couple it to a conventional current generation method at the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) fusion experiment. After coupling, the combined process generated 1 million amperes of current using 40 percent less energy than needed to generate this current using the conventional means by itself, thus demonstrating that a high-quality initial magnetic configuration was produced by CHI.
November 5, 2010 -- The devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake marks a defining moment for China's earthquake science program. The focus of a special November issue of the prestigious Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), the M 7.9 earthquake has garnered intense interest among seismologists, allowing the Chinese science community to demonstrate its capability to a global audience.
Scientists have long known that large volcanic explosions can affect the weather by spewing particles that block solar energy and cool the air.
Some suspect that extended "volcanic winters" from gigantic eruptions helped kill off dinosaurs and Neanderthals.
AMES, Iowa – Patricia Thiel of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory put a box of tissues to the right, a stack of coasters to the middle and a trinket box to the left.
NASA's infrared satellite imagery has confirmed that Tomas is intensifying as convection is strengthening and cloud tops within the system are getting colder.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---The results of a high-profile Fermilab physics experiment involving a University of Michigan professor appear to confirm strange 20-year-old findings that poke holes in the standard model, suggesting the existence of a new elementary particle: a fourth flavor of neutrino.
The new results go further to describe a violation of a fundamental symmetry of the universe asserting that particles of antimatter behave in the same way as their matter counterparts.
