Boulder, Colorado, USA – Landslides are one of the most hazardous aspects of our planet, causing billions of dollars in damage and thousands of deaths each year. Most large landslides strike with little warning -- and thus geologists do not often have the ability to collect important data that can be used to better understand the behavior of these dangerous events. The 10 April 2013 collapse at Kennecott's Bingham Canyon open-pit copper mine in Utah is an important exception.
Earth
Understanding forest biodiversity and how carbon dioxide is stored within trees is an important area of ecological research. The bigger the tree, the more carbon it stores and a study in New Phytologist explores global variance in tree height, identifying temperature as the most important factor behind the tallest species.
Height gives canopy trees, the focus of much forest carbon research, a competitive advantage as they can place leaves at higher light levels while suppressing their competitors. Height also allows for wind-dispersed pollen and fruits to travel further.
In the study by Toulany et al., it was demonstrated for the first time that long term treatment with inhibitors of PI3K (as it is performed clinically) results in a reactivation of the major survival component Akt through a so far unknown regulatory loop via ERK1/2. This reactivation of Akt limits quite efficiently the response of the tested tumor cell lines presenting constitutively active K-Ras activity (both through K-RAS mutation or over-expression of K-RAS wildtype) to antagonistic strategies directed against PI3K.
Sea snails that leap to escape their predators may soon lose their extraordinary jumping ability because of rising human carbon dioxide emissions, a team of international scientists has discovered.
Lead author of the study published today, Dr Sue-Ann Watson from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) and James Cook University observed that the conch snail, which uses a strong foot to leap away from approaching predators, either stops jumping, or takes longer to jump, when exposed to the levels of carbon dioxide projected for the end of this century.
Manufacturers of increasingly minute computer chips, transistors and other products will have to take special note of research findings at the University of Huddersfield. The implications are that a key process used to transform the properties of nanoscale materials can cause much greater damage than previously realised.
SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 6, 2014 – Last year's gigantic landslide at a Utah copper mine probably was the biggest nonvolcanic slide in North America's modern history, and included two rock avalanches that happened 90 minutes apart and surprisingly triggered 16 small earthquakes, University of Utah scientists discovered.
Supervolcanos are not usual volcanos. By effectively "exploding" as opposed to erupting, they leave a giant hole in the Earth's crust instead of a volcanic cone – a caldera, which can be up to one hundred kilometres in diameter. On average, supervolcanos are active more rarely than once every 100,000 years; since records began, none has been active. Consequently, researchers can only gain a vague idea of these events based on the ash and rock layers that have survived.
Factors determining the frequency and magnitude of volcanic phenomena have been uncovered by an international team of researchers.
Experts from the Universities of Geneva, Bristol and Savoie carried out over 1.2 million simulations to establish the conditions in which volcanic eruptions of different sizes occur.
The team used numerical modelling and statistical techniques to identify the circumstances that control the frequency of volcanic activity and the amount of magma that will be released.
Many people think of stink bugs as pests, especially as the brown marmorated stink bugs spreads throughout the U.S. However, certain stink bugs are beneficial, such as Podisus nigrispinus (Dallas), a predatory stink bug that is considered an important biological control agent for various insect pests of cotton, soybean, tomato, corn, kale, and other crops.
This news release is available in Spanish.
Pine Island Glacier is one of the biggest routes for ice to flow from Antarctica into the sea. The floating ice shelf at the glacier's tip has been melting and thinning for the past four decades, causing the glacier to speed up and discharge more ice.
Understanding this ice shelf is a key for predicting sea-level rise in a warming world. A paper published Jan. 2 in the advance online version of the journal Science shows that the ice shelf melting depends on the local wind direction, which is tied to tropical changes associated with El Nino.
A new study published in Science this month suggests the thinning of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is much more susceptible to climatic and ocean variability than at first thought. Observations by a team of scientists at British Antarctic Survey, and other institutions, show large fluctuations in the ocean heat in Pine Island Bay. The team discovered that oceanic melting of the ice shelf into which the glacier flows decreased by 50 per cent between 2010 and 2012, and this may have been due to a La Ninã weather event.
Irvine, Calif., Jan. 2, 2014 — A compound derived from a traditional Chinese herbal medicine has been found effective at alleviating pain, pointing the way to a new nonaddictive analgesic for acute inflammatory and nerve pain, according to UC Irvine pharmacology researchers.
SAN FRANCISCO – Rare earthquake lights are more likely to occur on or near rift environments, where subvertical faults allow stress-induced electrical currents to flow rapidly to the surface, according to a new study published in the Jan./Feb. issue of Seismological Research Letters.
From the early days of seismology, the luminous phenomena associated with some earthquakes have intrigued scholars. Earthquake lights (EQL) appear before or during earthquakes, but rarely after.