Smooth" or grainy? Is space-time continuous or is it made up of very fine (10-35 metres on the "Planck scale") but discrete grains, if we look at it very close up ? If the latter were true, scientists think, this would lead to deviations from the theory of special relativity formulated by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago.
Earth
However, it is crucial what one observes – paper fracture or the avalanching of snow. The results were just published in the Nature Communications journal.
A six-year study of the Financial Times has found that the more frequently a company is mentioned in the newspaper in the morning, the greater the volume of shares traded in that company during the same day.
Merve Alanyali, of the Centre for Complexity at the University of Warwick, and Suzy Moat and Tobias Preis, of Warwick Business School, looked at 1,821 issues of the Financial Times from January 2, 2007 to December 31, 2012.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – While climate change negotiators struggle to agree on ways to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, they have paid inadequate attention to other greenhouse gases associated with livestock, according to an analysis by an international research team.
A reduction in non-CO2 greenhouse gases will be required to abate climate change, the researchers said. Cutting releases of methane and nitrous oxide, two gases that pound-for-pound trap more heat than does CO2, should be considered alongside the challenge of reducing fossil fuel use.
A UT Arlington landscape architect and his graduate students have published three case studies for the 2013 Case Study Investigation Series for the Landscape Architecture Foundation that help show environmental, economic and social benefits of notable projects in that sector.
Washington, D.C.—Table salt, sodium chloride, is one of the first chemical compounds that schoolchildren learn. New research from a team including Carnegie's Alexander Goncharov shows that under certain high-pressure conditions, plain old salt can take on some surprising forms that violate standard chemistry predictions and may hold the key to answering questions about planet formation. Their work is published December 20 in Science.
This news release is available in German.
Though it was hailed as a triumph for the "Standard Model" of physics – the reigning model of fundamental forces and particles – physicists were quick to emphasize that last year's discovery of the Higgs boson still left gaps in our understanding of the universe.
The coexistence of two opposing phenomena might be the secret to understanding the enduring mystery in physics of how materials heralded as the future of powering our homes and communities actually work, according to Princeton University-led research. Such insight could help spur the further development of high-efficiency electric-power delivery.
A small band of particle-seeking scientists at Yale and Harvard has established a new benchmark for the electron's almost perfect roundness, raising doubts about certain theories that predict what lies beyond physics' reigning model of fundamental forces and particles, the Standard Model.
In the very beginning of the school chemistry course, we are told of NaCl as an archetypal ionic compound. Being less electronegative, sodium loses its electron to chlorine, which, following the "octet rule", thus acquires the 8-electron electronic configuration of a noble gas. All the rules predict NaCl to be the only possible compound formed by chlorine and sodium. The research team led by Artem R. Oganov, Professor of Crystallography at Stony Brook University, has discovered new sodium chlorides that call for revision of textbook chemistry.
Boulder, Colo., USA – GSA Bulletin articles posted online ahead of print on 6 and 13 December 2013 cover earthquake hazards of the Santa Barbara suburban area; apatite and the skeletons of early animals; the peculiar geological features of Faial (Azores, Portugal); the nature of Mount Rainier; the origin of Pearya terrane, Canada; a re-interpretation of the Chilhowee Group of the Appalachian Blue Ridge; and more. Authors hale from the U.S., Italy, South Africa, and Canada.
The NRDA researchers found that moderate to severe lung disease was five times more likely in the Barataria Bay dolphins, with symptoms including lung masses and consolidation. The researchers also found that 25 percent of the Barataria Bay dolphins were significantly underweight and the population overall had very low levels of adrenal hormones, which are critical for responding to stress.
The figures come out in a study made at Aalto University in Finland examining developments in food availability and food self-sufficiency in 1965. Researchers of Aalto University examined the development of food availability in recent decades for the first time.
Food availability has improved especially in the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, China, and Southeast Asia. Although food availability has increased on the global level, food self-sufficiency has remained relatively low.
Electronic devices such as mobile phones and tablets spur on a scientific race to find smaller and smaller information processing and storage elements. One of the challenges in this race is to reproduce certain magnetic effects at nanometre scale.