Potsdam, 26.02.2009 – Geothermal energy is increasingly contributing to the power supply world wide. Iceland is world-leader in expanding development of geothermal utilization: in recent years the annual power supply here doubled to more than 500 MW alone in the supply of electricity. And also in Germany, a dynamic development is to be seen: over 100 MW of heat are currently being provided through geothermal energy.
Earth
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Ice in Antarctica suddenly appeared — in geologic terms — about 35 million years ago. For the previous 100 million years the continent had been essentially ice-free.
The question for science has been, why? What triggered glaciers to form at the South Pole?
Matthew Huber, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University, says no evidence of global cooling during the period had been found.
New Haven, Conn. – Global climate rapidly shifted from a relatively ice-free world to one with massive ice sheets on Antarctica about 34 million years ago. What happened? What changed? A team of scientists led by Yale geologists offers a new perspective on the nature of changing climatic conditions across this greenhouse-to-icehouse transition—one that refutes earlier theories and has important implications for predicting future climate changes.
Ancient footprints found at Rutgers' Koobi Fora Field School show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years ago.
Published as the cover story in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Science, this anatomical interpretation is the conclusion of Rutgers Professor John W.K. Harris and an international team of colleagues. Harris is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies and director of the Koobi Fora Field Project.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - One of agriculture's most versatile crops could one day play a role in combating climate change, Purdue University research shows.
In addition to using soybeans in beverages, biofuel, lip balm, crayons, candles and a host of other products, Purdue agricultural engineers Al Heber and Jiqin Ni found that soybean oil reduces greenhouse gas emissions when sprayed inside swine finishing barns.
Globally, commercial ships emit almost half as much particulate pollution into the air as the total amount released by cars, according to a new study. Ship pollutants affect both the Earth's climate and the health of people living along coastlines.
MOTUEKA, NEW ZEALAND—A horticultural research team from New Zealand and Canada has introduced a new red raspberry cultivar. 'Moutere' is a new floricane fruiting red raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.) created in a planned breeding program at The Horticulture and Food Research Institute of New Zealand Limited (recently renamed The New Zealand Institute of Plant and Food Research Limited (Plant and Food Research).
Commercial ships emit almost half as much particulate pollutants into the air globally as the total amount released by the world's cars, according to a new study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The study is the first to provide a global estimate of maritime shipping's total contribution to air particle pollution based on direct emission measurements. The authors estimate ships emit about 1,100 tons of particle pollution globally each year.
Otto, NC – New research by U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) scientists and partners suggests the hemlock woolly adelgid is killing hemlock trees faster than expected in the southern Appalachians and rapidly altering the carbon cycle of these forests. SRS researchers and cooperators from the University of Georgia published the findings in the most recent issue of the journal Ecosystems.
Berkeley -- Even as debate rages over the safety of Australia's "Prepare, stay and defend, or leave early" policy of wildfire defense, fire researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and in Australia say that the strategy is worth consideration in California and other regions in the United States.
Very large and abrupt changes in temperature recorded over Greenland and across the North Atlantic during the last Ice Age were actually global in extent, according to an international team of researchers led by Cardiff University.
New research, published in the journal Nature today, supports the idea that changes in ocean circulation within the Atlantic played a central role in abrupt climate change on a global scale.
The rate of ad clicks from sponsored and non-sponsored links was reported in a recent study conducted by researchers from Penn State and the Queensland University of Technology
Jim Jansen, assistant professor of information science and technology, Penn State, along with Amanda Spink, professor of information technology, Queensland University of Technology, studied the rate of ad clicks through on Dogpile.com, a meta-search engine that combines the search results from larger search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, Ask and MSN.
MADISON, WI, February 23, 2009--The practice of no-till has increased considerably during the past 20 yr. Soils under no-till usually host a more abundant and diverse biota and are less prone to erosion, water loss, and structural breakdown than tilled soils. Their organic matter content is also often increased and consequently, no-till is proposed as a measure to mitigate the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
Using data from the satellite-based MIPAS and GOME-2 instruments, scientists have for the first time detected important bromine species in the atmosphere. These new measurements will help scientists to better understand sources of ozone-depleting species and to improve simulations of stratospheric ozone chemistry.
DURHAM, N.C. -- Ancient groundwater being tapped by Jordan, one of the 10 most water-deprived nations in the world, has been found to contain twenty times the radiation considered safe for drinking water in a new study by an international team of researchers.
"The combined activities of 228 radium and 226 radium – the two long-lived isotopes of radium – in the groundwater we tested are up to 2000 percent higher than international drinking standards," said Avner Vengosh, associate professor of earth and ocean sciences in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.