Los Angeles, CA (January 14, 2014) A new study out today in SAGE Open finds that instead of breaking stereotypes, intellectually successful Black individuals may be susceptible to being remembered as "Whiter" and therefore 'exceptions to their race,' perpetuating cultural beliefs about race and intelligence. This new study shows that a Black man who is associated with being educated is remembered as being lighter in skin tone than he actually is, a phenomenon the study authors refer to as "skin tone memory bias."
Earth
Alexandria, VA – What goes into a great wine and what role does geology play? Wine experts use the word terroir to describe the myriad environmental influences, including climate, that go into growing winegrapes. Climate is arguably the most influential factor and it produces the most identifiable differences among wines. So how is climate change affecting wines globally? And how do other factors, such as the bedrock below the vineyard and the soil, produce subtle expressions in wine?
Understanding collective behavior of ultra-cold quantum gases is of great interest since it is intimately related to many encountered systems in nature such as human behavior, swarms of birds, traffic jam, sand dunes, neutron stars, fundamental magnetic properties of solids, or even super-fluidity or super-conductivity. In all of these everyday life examples, collective behavior plays a crucial role since all participating objects move, voluntarily or not, synchronously.
Four years after the January 2010 earthquake, 145,000 people still remain homeless in Haiti. A cheap and simple technology to repair earthquake damaged buildings – developed at the University of Sheffield – could help to reduce these delays by quickly making buildings safe and habitable.
Recent tests showed that a damaged building repaired using the technique could withstand a major earthquake – similar in scale and proximity to the buildings that collapsed during the Haiti earthquake.
Members of the public have a negative view of climate engineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the environment to counteract climate change, according to a new study.
The results are from researchers from the University of Southampton and Massey University (New Zealand) who have undertaken the first systematic large-scale evaluation of the public reaction to climate engineering.
The work is published in Nature Climate Change this week (12 January 2014).
Scientists studying the atmosphere above Barrow, Alaska, have discovered unprecedented levels of molecular chlorine in the air, a new study reports.
Molecular chlorine, from sea salt released by melting sea ice, reacts with sunlight to produce chlorine atoms. These chlorine atoms are highly reactive and can oxidize many constituents of the atmosphere including methane and elemental mercury, as well activate bromine chemistry, which is an even stronger oxidant of elemental mercury. Oxidized mercury is more reactive and can be deposited to the Arctic ecosystem.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Jan. 9, 2014 -- Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville have pioneered a new technique for forming a two-dimensional, single-atom sheet of two different materials with a seamless boundary.
The study, published in the journal Science, could enable the use of new types of 2-D hybrid materials in technological applications and fundamental research.
Power plants that use natural gas and a new technology to squeeze more energy from the fuel release far less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than coal-fired power plants do, according to a new analysis accepted for publication Jan. 8 in Earth's Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The so-called "combined cycle" natural gas power plants also release significantly less nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, which can worsen air quality.
As Europe is battered by storms, new research reminds us of the other side of the coin. By the end of this century, droughts in Europe are expected to be more frequent and intense due to climate change and increased water use. These results, by researchers from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the University of Kassel in Germany, are published today in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
Light-gathering macromolecules in plant cells transfer energy by taking advantage of molecular vibrations whose physical descriptions have no equivalents in classical physics, according to the first unambiguous theoretical evidence of quantum effects in photosynthesis published today in the journal Nature Communications.
Volcanic rock dating suggests the painting of a Çatalhöyük mural may have overlapped with an eruption in Turkey according to results published January 8, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Axel Schmitt from the University of California Los Angeles and colleagues from other institutions.
From stretchy electronics to Martian chemistry, the most notable advances in the chemical world in 2013 appear in the year-in-review issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. The issue also provides a look back at the business of chemistry and the politics affecting it, as well as an update on discoveries that a decade ago promised great things.
TALLAHASSEE – Florida State University researchers have spearheaded a major review of fisheries research that examines the domino effect that occurs when too many fish are harvested from one habitat.
The loss of a major species from an ecosystem can have unintended consequences because of the connections between that species and others in the system. Moreover, these changes often occur rapidly and unexpectedly, and are difficult to reverse.
The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and Water Resources Research (WRR).
In this release: