Earth

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Nutrient enrichment and climate change are posing yet another concern of growing importance: an apparent increase in the toxicity of some algal blooms in freshwater lakes and estuaries around the world, which threatens aquatic organisms, ecosystem health and human drinking water safety.

As this nutrient enrichment, or "eutrophication" increases, so will the proportion of toxin-producing strains of cyanobacteria in harmful algal blooms, scientists said.

Discovered in the 19th century, thermoelectric materials have the remarkable property that heating them creates a small electrical current. But enhancing this current to a level compatible with the needs of modern technologies has revealed an extraordinary challenge for scientists of the last decades, despite important theoretical and experimental efforts. Now a novel approach could lead to substantial progress. At ETH Zurich the quantum optics group of Tilman Esslinger has created a key model to better understand the fundamental phenomena – "a thermoelectric material emulator".

Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the November issue of GSA Today, James W. Sears of the University of Montana in Missoula advocates a possible Canadian connection for the early Miocene Grand Canyon by arguing for the existence of a "super-river" traceable from headwaters in the southern Colorado Plateau through a proto–Grand Canyon to a delta in the Labrador Sea.

From crimson red to lavender to mustard yellow, vibrant hues can be coaxed from common — and a few uncommon — ingredients to add color to fabrics. The American Chemical Society's (ACS') Bytesize Science series explains the chemistry behind natural dyes with a new episode filmed at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. The episode is available now on http://www.BytesizeScience.com.

Australian marine scientists have found the first evidence that coral itself may play an important role in regulating local climate.

They have discovered that the coral animal—not just its algal symbiont—makes an important sulphur-based molecule with properties to assist it in many ways, ranging from cellular protection in times of heat stress to local climate cooling by encouraging clouds to form.

Scientists have a new way to edge around a difficult problem in quantum physics, now that a research team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have proved* their recent theory about how particles of light flow within a novel device they built.

Unprecedented torrents of data flood out of research labs on a continual basis, but making sense of it all remains a major scientific bottleneck. How software is evolving to transform this data deluge into knowledge is the topic of a news story in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.