MADISON – For plants and animals forced to tough out harsh winter weather, the coverlet of snow that blankets the north country is a refuge, a stable beneath-the-snow habitat that gives essential respite from biting winds and subzero temperatures.
But in a warming world, winter and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere is in decline, putting at risk many plants and animals that depend on the space beneath the snow to survive the blustery chill of winter.
The search for cleaner, low temperature nuclear fuels has produced a shock result for a team of experts at The University of Nottingham.
First they created a stable version of a 'trophy molecule' that has eluded scientists for decades. Now they have discovered that the bonding within this molecule is far different than expected. Remarkably their findings have shown that it behaves in much the same way as its counterparts in the well-known transitional metals such as chromium, molybdenum and tungsten.
Graphite is known to be a low-friction material, and rocks rich in graphite are often found in fault zones. Oohashi et al. conducted laboratory studies to determine how much graphite is needed to reduce the frictional strength of a fault.
North Carolina State University researchers have identified a new mechanism to convert natural gas into energy up to 70 times faster, while effectively capturing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2).
"This could make power generation from natural gas both cleaner and more efficient," says Fanxing Li, co-author of a paper on the research and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State.
An international team of physicists, including researchers from the Universities of York and St. Andrews, has demonstrated that chaos can beat order - at least as far as light storage is concerned.
In a collaboration led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, the researchers deformed mirrors in order to disrupt the regular light path in an optical cavity and, surprisingly, the resulting chaotic light paths allowed more light to be stored than with ordered paths.
As the Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite flew over Indonesia's Flores Sea April 29, it captured an image of Paluweh volcano spewing ash into the air. The satellite's Operational Land Imager detected the white cloud of smoke and ash drifting northwest, over the green forests of the island and the blue waters of the tropical sea. The Thermal Infrared Sensor on LDCM picked up even more.
By imaging the heat emanating from the 5-mile-wide volcanic island, TIRS revealed a hot spot at the top of the volcano where lava has been oozing in recent months.
Preterm infants appear to mature better if they are shielded from most wavelengths of visible light, from violet to orange. But it has been a challenge to develop a controllable light filter for preterm incubators that can switch between blocking out all light--for sleeping--and all but red light to allows medical staff and parents to check up on the kids when they're awake.
Accurately sensing rotation is important to a variety of technologies, from today's smartphones to navigational instruments that help keep submarines, planes, and satellites on course. In a paper accepted for publication in the American Institute of Physics' journal Review of Scientific Instruments, researchers from the Technical University of Munich and New Zealand's University of Canterbury discuss what are called "large ring laser gyroscopes" that are six orders of magnitude more sensitive than gyroscopes commercially available.
New York, NY—May 3, 2013—Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a technique to isolate a single water molecule inside a buckyball, or C60, and to drive motion of the so-called "big" nonpolar ball through the encapsulated "small" polar H2O molecule, a controlling transport mechanism in a nanochannel under an external electric field.
It's difficult to imagine how a degree or two of warming will affect a location. Will it rain less? What will happen to the area's vegetation?
New Berkeley Lab research offers a way to envision a warmer future. It maps how Earth's myriad climates—and the ecosystems that depend on them—will move from one area to another as global temperatures rise.
News of a hurricane threat sends our hearts racing, glues us to the Internet for updates, and makes us rush to the store to stock up on staples. Hawaii, fortunately, has been largely free from these violent storms in the recent past, only two having made landfall in more than 30 years.
Improving our understanding of the human brain, gathering insights into the origin of our universe through the detection of gravitational waves, or optimizing the precision of GPS systems- all are difficult challenges to master because they require the ability to visualize highly fragile elements, which can be terminally damaged by any attempt to observe them. Now, quantum physics has provided a solution.
Similarly to the way a river, flowing across Earth's surface, influences sediment transport and shaping of the landscape, so coastal winds, flowing over dunes, affect how the dune shapes evolve and how sand is transported along the coast.
Wind flow over dunes has been extensively studied, but in most cases studies have been two-dimensional and focused on straight dunes with smooth slopes and no vegetation or other features that might affect how airflow separates at the crest of the dune.
African camels and rodents migrated to Iberia, and European rabbits and rats migrated to North Africa at the same time before isolation of the Mediterranean Sea during the Messinian.
A new date of 6.23 million years ago for the Venta del Moro fossil site (Spain) can be regarded as the first appearance datum for the African migrants Paraethomys and Paracamelus in Europe.
SAN FRANCISCO, May 3, 2013 – The 2011 Tohoku earthquake is the best recorded and most studied giant earthquake, resulting in a remarkable suite of observations. A special issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA) captures the latest progress in understanding what happened when this massive M >9 earthquake struck offshore of Japan and produced a devastating tsunami that claimed almost 20,000 lives and precipitated the world's second worst nuclear power plant disaster.