Earth
Geological investigations in the Himalayas have revealed evidence that when India and Asia collided some 90 million years ago, the continental crust of the Indian tectonic plate was forced down under the Asian plate, sinking down into the Earth's mantle to a depth of at least 200 km kilometres1.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 27, 2010 – Imagine creating novel devices with amazing and exotic optical properties not found in Nature—by simply evaporating a droplet of particles on a surface.
Sarcopenia — low skeletal muscle mass and strength — is often found in obese people and older adults; it has been hypothesized that sarcopenia puts individuals at risk for developing Type 2 diabetes.
To gauge the effect of sarcopenia on insulin resistance (the root cause of Type 2 diabetes) and blood glucose levels in both obese and non-obese people, UCLA researchers performed a cross-sectional analysis of data on 14,528 people from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III.
Scientists have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.
The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository – something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.
The rubber boots that emergency personnel wear when responding to situations where hazardous materials (HazMat) are present may be functional, but they're not very comfortable. New research coming out of North Carolina State University hopes to provide a next generation HazMat boot that meets both criteria.
ITHACA, N.Y. – When it comes to potentially doubling the output of the world's fourth largest food crop, the secret may be in the spit.
Researchers at Cornell University, as well as the University of Goettingen and National University of Colombia, have discovered that when a major South American pest infests potato tubers, the plant produces bigger spuds.
Climate change is about more than just polar bears. That is the message from Dr Kate Manzo whose research into climate change communication has been published in Meteorological Applications. The research, which reviews the efforts of journalists, campaigners and politicians to engage the British public with climate change, explores how new 'visual strategies' can communicate climate change messages against a backdrop of increased climate scepticism.
Researchers at the Department of Chemistry and Nanoscience Center (NSC) of the University of Jyväskylä (Dr Olga Lopez-Acevedo and Professor Hannu Häkkinen) have resolved the structural, electronic and optical properties of a chiral gold nanocluster that remained a mystery for ten years. The theoretical structure was confirmed via comparison to experimental results obtained by X-ray diffraction from powder samples of the pure cluster material. The theoretical work was done in collaboration with researchers at Kansas State University and the experimental part at Hokkaido University.
There's more to decisions about land use than climate change, population growth, migration and prosperous economies. In the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, individual religious beliefs in local Saints are also linked to how the Amazig (Berber) people use their environment and manage local resources. These findings1 by Dr.
In the first peer-reviewed scientific paper to be published about the Icelandic volcano since its eruption in April 2010, UK researchers write that the ash plume which hovered over Scotland carried a significant and self-renewing electric charge.
The volcano-chasing researchers argue this adds a further dimension to understanding the detailed nature of volcanic plumes and their effects on air travel.
TORONTO, ON – A study by researchers at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum sheds new light on a previously unclassifiable 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore known as Nectocaris pteryx.
A halo may be difficult to acquire in terms of virtue, but it can also be tough to calculate in terms of physics. Thomas Papenbrock, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his colleagues Gaute Hagen from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Morten Hjorth-Jensen from the University of Oslo have managed to do just that, however, and report their findings in "Ab-initio computation of the 17F proton-halo state and resonances in A = 17 nuclei," published earlier this month in Physical Review Letters.
Research published this week in PLoS Medicine by Toby Leslie and colleagues shows that the Mediterranean G6PD variant protects against P. vivax infection in a cohort of Afghan refugees. Although further studies are needed to determine whether other G6PD variants protect against P. vivax malaria, these findings suggest that P. vivax malaria might be responsible for the retention of the G6PD deficiency trait in some human populations.