Earth

Residents of the southern United States and the Caribbean have seen it many times during the summer months—a whitish haze in the sky that seems to hang around for days. The resulting thin film of dust on their homes and cars actually is soil from the deserts of Africa, blown across the Atlantic Ocean.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Whether it's never-ending heat waves or winter storms, atmospheric blocking can have a significant impact on local agriculture, business and the environment. Although these stagnant weather patterns are often difficult to predict, University of Missouri researchers are now studying whether increasing planet temperatures and carbon dioxide levels could lead to atmospheric blocking and when this blocking might occur, leading to more accurate forecasts.

While airplane and rocket experiments have proved that gravity makes clocks tick more slowly – a central prediction of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity – a new experiment in an atom interferometer measures this slowdown 10,000 times more accurately than before, and finds it to be exactly what Einstein predicted.

The result shows once again how well Einstein's theory describes the real world, said Holger Müller, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Two University of Colorado at Boulder physicists are part of a collaborative team working with the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York that have created the hottest temperature matter ever measured in the universe -- 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit.

Geoengineering -- deliberate manipulation of the Earth's climate to slow or reverse global warming -- has gained a foothold in the climate change discussion. But before effective action can be taken, the Earth's natural biogeochemical cycles must be better understood.

Welding uses heat to join pieces of metal in everything from circuits to skyscrapers. But Rice University researchers have found a way to beat the heat on the nanoscale.

Jun Lou, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and materials science, and his group have discovered that gold wires between three-billionths and 10-billionths of a meter wide weld themselves together quite nicely – without heat.

Most Americans like the idea of conservation, but few practice it in their everyday lives, according to the results of a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities.

A majority of Americans say that it is "very important" or "somewhat important" to turn off unneeded lights (92 percent), to lower the thermostat in winter (83 percent), and to use public transportation or a carpool (73 percent), among other conservation behaviors. Yet the study found that: