Does life exist elsewhere or is our planet unique, making us truly alone in the universe? Much of the work carried out by NASA, together with other research institutions, is aimed at trying to come to grips with this question.
Earth
Santa's workshop at the North Pole is not under water, despite recent reports. A dramatic image captured by a University of Washington monitoring buoy reportedly shows a lake at the North Pole. But Santa doesn't yet need to buy a snorkel.
"Every summer when the sun melts the surface the water has to go someplace, so it accumulates in these ponds," said Jamie Morison, a polar scientist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory and principal investigator since 2000 of the North Pole Environmental Observatory. "This doesn't look particularly extreme."
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have demonstrated the reliability and efficiency of "real-time hybrid simulation" for testing a type of powerful damping system that might be installed in buildings and bridges to reduce structural damage and injuries during earthquakes.
The magnetorheological-fluid dampers are shock-absorbing devices containing a liquid that becomes far more viscous when a magnetic field is applied.
A technique for trapping the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide deep underground could at the same be used to release the last fraction of natural gas liquids from ailing reservoirs, thus offsetting some of the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels. So says a paper to be published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology.
Myanmar at the crossroads: Conservationists see opportunities and challenges in biodiversity hotspot
Long isolated by economic and political sanctions, Myanmar returns to the international community amid high expectations and challenges associated with protecting the country's great natural wealth from the impacts of economic growth and climate change.
The ionosphere, one of the regions of the upper atmosphere, plays an important role in global communications. Ionized by solar radiation, this electricity-rich region is used for the transmission of long wave communications, such as radio waves. Now Prof. Colin Price of Tel Aviv University's Department of Geophysical, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, working alongside PhD candidate Israel Silber, has discovered that the radio waves reflecting back to Earth from the ionosphere offer valuable news on climate change as well.
One of the most important foundations of scientists' understanding of global climate change is the land surface air temperature record, the long-term observations of air temperature measured 2 meters (6.5 feet) above the ground.
Satellite observations made from 1982 to 2010 have shown that warm, arid regions - such as the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, the deserts of Argentina, the Middle East, central and western Australia, and the regions that ring the Sahara - are getting greener.
In recent years there have been a number of prolonged heat waves and heavy rain events, and studies are showing that global climate warming is increasing the risk of extreme rainfall and drought.
To add to the evidence linking climate warming and extreme precipitation and provide a regional as well as global perspective, Lau et al. analyzed projections from 14 different climate models that are part of the CMIP5 project, which is organized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in preparation for its upcoming fifth assessment report.
Atmospheric rivers, narrow bands of enhanced water vapor transport in the atmosphere, have been associated with extreme rainfall and flooding in some areas, especially western North America. Lavers and Villarini now show that atmospheric rivers are also responsible for a significant number of days of high precipitation in Western Europe.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A new study has found that online tools, access to experimental data and other services provided through "cyberinfrastructure" are helping to accelerate progress in earthquake engineering and science.
The research is affiliated with the National Science Foundation's George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), based at Purdue University. NEES includes 14 laboratories for earthquake engineering and tsunami research, tied together with cyberinfrastructure to provide information technology for the network.
7/30/13, New Orleans, LA. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, shows that passively coping offspring of mothers stressed during their pregnancy were at risk to develop obesity and type 2 diabetes.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study suggests that the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park is beginning to bring back a key part of the diet of grizzly bears that has been missing for much of the past century – berries that help bears put on fat before going into hibernation.
It's one of the first reports to identify the interactions between these large, important predators, based on complex ecological processes. It was published today by scientists from Oregon State University and Washington State University in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
What do wound healing, cancer metastasis, and bacteria colonies have in common? They all involve the collective displacement of biological cells. New research sheds some new light on the physical mechanisms provoking the displacement of a sheet of cell, known as an epithelium. It typically covers our organs including the stomach and intestine, as well as our epidermis.
Year-round ice-free conditions across the surface of the Arctic Ocean could explain why the Earth was substantially warmer during the Pliocene Epoch than it is today, despite similar concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to new research carried out at the University of Colorado Boulder.
In early May, instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii marked a new record: The concentration of carbon dioxide climbed to 400 parts per million for the first time in modern history.