BUFFALO, N.Y. -- During the past decade, residents of Pasto, Colombia, and neighboring villages near Galeras, Colombia's most dangerous volcano, have been threatened with evacuation, but compliance varies. With each new eruption -- the most recent explosion occurred June 7-9 -- Colombian officials have grown increasingly concerned about the safety of the residents who live within striking distance of Galeras, located 700 km from Bogota.
Earth
Whether it's the summer grass that tickles your feet or the red Bordeaux smacking on your palette, nearly every part of the world around you carries special chemical markers. These markers, called isotopes, can tell scientists where the molecules that compose a substance are from, where they traveled, and what happened to them along the way. But doing these analyses has been complex and costly. Now, Stanford chemists have developed a new method to make isotopic analysis easier and less expensive.
Cambridge, Md. (June 29, 2009) – An international team of scientists warns that accelerating losses of seagrasses across the globe threaten the immediate health and long-term sustainability of coastal ecosystems. The team has compiled and analyzed the first comprehensive global assessment of seagrass observations and found that 58 percent of world's seagrass meadows are currently declining.
An international team of researchers has modified chlorophyll from an alga so that it resembles the extremely efficient light antennae of bacteria. The team was then able to determine the structure of these light antennae. This is the first step to converting sunlight into energy using an artificial leaf. The researchers will be publishing an article on their research findings in the online Early Edition of the PNAS journal in the week starting 29 June.
Particulate pollution thought to be holding climate change in check by reflecting sunlight instead enhances warming when combined with airborne soot, a new study has found.
Like a black car on a bright summer day, soot absorbs solar energy. Recent atmospheric models have ranked soot, also called black carbon, second only to carbon dioxide in potential for atmospheric warming. But particles, or aerosols, such as soot mix with other chemicals in the atmosphere, complicating estimates of their role in changing climate.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Composite materials such as fiberglass, which take on a mix of properties of their constituent compounds, have been around for decades. Now, an MIT materials scientist is taking composites to the nanoscale, where entirely new properties, not found in any of the original compounds, can emerge.
NEWPORT NEWS, VA, June 29, 2009 – A new calculation clarifies the complicated relationship between protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus and offers a fascinating resolution of the famous NuTeV Anomaly.
The calculation, published in the journal Physical Review Letters on June 26, was carried out by a collaboration of researchers from the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Tokai University and the University of Washington. It grew out of attempts to make sense of the complex environment found in the nucleus of the atom.
At a recent physics seminar at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Fermilab physicist Pat Lukens of the CDF experiment announced the observation of a new particle, the Omega-sub-b. The particle contains three quarks, two strange quarks and a bottom quark (s-s-b). It is an exotic relative of the much more common proton and has about six times the proton's mass.
New Haven, Conn.—A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.
They also used the two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms, such as a simple search, demonstrating quantum information processing with a solid-state device for the first time. Their findings will appear in Nature's advanced online publication June 28.
AMES, Iowa – Declining wind speeds in parts of the United States could impact more than the wind power industry, say Iowa State University climate researchers.
Three Iowa State researchers contributed their expertise in modeling North America's climate to a study to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres. The study – led by Sara C. Pryor, a professor of atmospheric science at Indiana University Bloomington – found that wind speeds across the country have decreased by an average of .5 percent to 1 percent per year since 1973.
Rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean have been shown to adversely affect shell-forming creatures and corals, and now a new study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has shown for the first time that CO2 can impact a fundamental bodily structure in fish.
The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.
University of Chicago researchers recently showed that dry granular materials such as sands, seeds and grains have properties similar to liquid, forming water-like droplets when poured from a given source. The finding could be important to a wide range of industries that use "fluidized" dry particles for oil refining, plastics manufacturing and pharmaceutical production.
Better understanding of the laws of physics motivates the Chicago experiments. Their results have also drawn the attention of a leading industrial firm, Particulate Solid Research Inc.
