Study: Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years.
From The Daily Mail:
Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years, new research reveals.
Ice blown out of the Arctic area by winds can explain the one-third drop of sea ice since 1979, scientists believe.
The study helps to explain the huge loss of ice in the region during the summers of 2007 and 2008, after which some commentators suggested the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free during the summertime within a decade.
Matching Russian rides to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires will be difficult without "extraordinary" US government help, a senior NASA insider said on Thursday. But the private space firm SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, says it is ready to step into the breach by undercutting the current $50 million-per-astronaut round-trip ticket for travelling to the ISS aboard the Russian Soyuz craft.
Forty years ago, Richard O'Barry watched Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, kill herself. Or so he says. She looked him in the eye, sank to the bottom of a steel tank and stopped breathing. The moment transformed the dolphin trainer into an animal-rights activist for life, and his role in The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary about the dolphin-meat business in a small town in Japan, has transformed him into a celebrity.
"The suicide was what turned me around," says O'Barry. "The [animal entertainment] industry doesn't want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide, but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don't take the next breath. It's suicide."
You may want to start keeping a closer eye on where you click if you live in Seattle.
Among 50 U.S. cities studied for their vulnerability to cybercrime, Seattle came out on top as the riskiest place, followed by Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, according to the report "Norton's Top 10 Riskiest Online Cities," released Monday.
Central Atlantic Magmatic Province Massive lava flow (top brown layer) sits atop end-Triassic (white) and Triassic (red) layers at a site in Five Islands Provincial Park, Nova Scotia. (Credit: Jessica. H. Whiteside/Brown University)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 23, 2010) — A shade more than 200 million years ago, the Earth looked far different than it does today. Most land on the planet was consolidated into one continent called Pangea. There was no Atlantic Ocean, and the rulers of the animal world were crurotarsans -- creatures closely related to modern crocodiles.
Nutrition experts have analyzed the food depicted in some of the best-known paintings of the biblical Last Supper and found that the portion and plate sizes depicted in them increased substantially from older paintings to those painted more recently.
The findings suggest the trend of bigger plates and portions that has been noticed recently and linked to obesity may have been in the works for much longer, the researchers suggest.
Researchers retrieve sperm from the abdomen of an ant. Credit: Boris Baer/UWA
From Cosmos:
SYDNEY: The queen of a social insect colony has one sexual encounter during her life, which involves many males, then controls which sperm will die off, researchers said.
A social insect queen only experiences a single day of sexual activity in her lifetime yet she must obtain all the sperm necessary to create an entire colony within that time frame. This means that social insect females store a large amount of sperm in their storage organ.
"A honeybee queen mates with many more males than she has to, thereby collecting much more sperm than she actually needs," said Boris Bear, from the University of Western Australia in Crawley.
The Sabreliner 65 and Her Swiss Crew Emmanuel Joffet - Sipa Press
From Popular Science:
First time the record has been set with refueling stops.
Piloting a plane older than two of the three crew on board, a Swiss team shattered Steve Fossett's around-the-world flight record by almost ten hours over the weekend, the first time the record has been set in this weight class with refueling stops. But the pilots didn't just have to negotiate the usual headwinds and bad weather -- their flight was nearly derailed by a volcanic eruption in Iceland that forced them to make an extra refueling stop and add an unexpected 12th leg to their journey.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo made its first captive carry flight early this morning at the Mojave Air and Space Port. SpaceShipTwo, which was christened the VSS Enterprise at its unveiling in December, is being carried by WhiteKnightTwo on its first test flight.
Image: Although "all-round" editors helped contribute to high-quality articles, the study's findings don't negate the importance of fact-checkers, copy editors and other contributors. Wikimedia Foundation
From Discovery News:
Wikipedians who can perform a range of roles -- rather than possess a single expertise -- are key to quality articles.
It takes a village of contributors -- adding paragraphs here, inserting references there -- to craft a quality Wikipedia article, according to a new study that identifies the types of contributors who initiate and dominate the process to separate the Wikipedia wheat from chaff.
Artist's schematic impression of the distortion of spacetime by a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy. The black hole will swallow dark matter at a rate which depends on its mass and on the amount of dark matter around it. (Credit: Felipe Esquivel Reed)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 22, 2010) — About 23 percent of the universe is made up of mysterious 'dark matter' -- invisible material only detected through its gravitational influence on its surroundings. Now two astronomers based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have found a hint of the way it behaves near black holes.
One key to happiness might be whether you make more than your peers, regardless of whether that income is six figures or just a mediocre take-home, a new study finds.
This concept of "doing better than the Joneses" is well established among children: A toy gets ditched as soon as a shinier toy in the hands of another child is spotted. But some researchers have often thought that when it comes to adults and money, things works differently, in that the more money one has, regardless of how it stacks up, the more resources can be acquired to generate happiness.
Sun Spots Solar storms, like this one captured by NASA’s STEREO satellite, could knock out the power grid. NASA
From Popular Science:
It depends on the source of the pulse. Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) large enough to cause you trouble come in two varieties: those produced by the sun, and those created by a nuclear bomb or another military-grade emitter device. With the sun-related variety, specifically coronal mass ejections (CMEs), your gear will probably be fine. But a really large CME could take down the power grid, says Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Power lines transmit electricity as an alternating current, but a pulse from a CME can introduce a direct current into the system, says Luke van der Zal, a technical executive at the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. This can cause transformers to overheat and work sluggishly, or fail altogether.
Colossal: This ice formation is a portion of the wall terraces of the Mojave Crater on Mars. It has barely suffered any erosion so offers scientists a tantalising glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like
From The Daily Mail:
It looks like a filmmaker's apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.
But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.
Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet's Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists.
The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater's wall terraces.
Iceland Volcano Could Have World Consequences -- MSNBC
1783 eruption changed weather patterns, sent poisoned air to British Isles
REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Blasts of lava and ash shot out of a volcano in southern Iceland on Monday and small tremors rocked the ground, a surge in activity that raised fears of a larger explosion at the nearby Katla volcano.
Scientists say history has proven that when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupts, Katla follows — the only question is how soon. And Katla, located under the massive Myrdalsjokull icecap, threatens disastrous flooding and explosive blasts when it blows.
My Comment: It is an uncomfortable thought to realize that even with our huge military arsenals, sophisticated technology, and all the tools that a modern and sophisticated society can bring to any problem .... when it comes to mother nature and the power that it can unleash we are powerless to do anything.
As to the 1783 eruption, a long time ago I did a university paper on the impact that the American revolution had on Canada. What struck me from the literature and news reports that I was reading was the impact that the 1783 eruption had on everyday life. Spring only came to Montreal late May, and winter returned by October. Growing crops was difficult and sporadic, and sickness was prevalent throughout the cities. The American Revolution was a major event, but the aftereffects of the 1783 volcanic explosion were just as serious.
If a repeat of the 1783 eruption was to occur today .... with the population centers that we have today .... there is no question in my mind the impact would be catastrophic.
Google has made its decision on China: it's moving search to Hong Kong.
Google has shut down its Google.cn site and is redirecting users to Google.com.hk, where it will offer uncensored Chinese-language search services. The company will maintain a research and development organization in China as well as a sales office, it announced Monday.
Scientists Say to Plant Milkweed to Help Save the Butterflies.
Monarch butterflies normally find sanctuary in the mountains of Mexico, away from the cold winters of North America, but a harsh winter of torrential rain and mudslides has decimated the monarch butterfly population.
"We saw a number of things happen in Mexico this winter that shouldn't be happening but are probably due to climate change in some way," said Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas.
This Triassic exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science helps to illustrate the battle between crocodiles and dinosaurs. Larry O'Hanlon
From Discovery News:
A massive volcanic eruption 200 million years ago tipped the scales in the battle between dinosaurs and crocodiles for global dominance.
Some 200 million years ago, Earth was on the verge of either an age of dinosaurs or an age of crocodiles. It took the largest volcanic eruption in the solar system -- and the loss of half of Earth's plant life -- to tip the scales in the dinos' favor, say researchers.
The idea is not new, but connecting the eruption to a 200-million-year-old mass extinction event has not been easy. Now that link is confirmed in an exhaustive new study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Facebook recently surpassed Google as the top destination on the Web. Granted, the victory only represents one week, but with traffic on par with Google, and membership exceeding 400 million users, Facebook is primed to challenge the vast Google empire for online advertising dollars.
According to a blog post from Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185 percent last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9 percent during the same time frame."
Glossy and greedy: Bluefin tuna is one of the world's most highly prized foodstuffs.
From The BBC:
"Welcome to the strange world of globalisation."
That is Roberto Mielgo's response to the fact that it is commercially viable to catch and keep live tuna in off-shore pens - or ranches - in the Spanish Mediterranean and feed them vast amounts of expensive caught fish (around 10kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1kg of body weight).
And to cull them by hand using divers, ship them to shore, package them in a purpose-built factory and fly them whole - on the same day - to market on the other side of the world.
Roberto Mielgo calls himself an independent fisheries consultant.
Atomic bombs changed carbon content in grapes. Credit: Wikimedia
From Cosmos:
WASHINGTON: Up to 5% of fine wines are not from the year the label indicates, according to Australian researchers who have carbon dated some top dollar wines.
The team of researchers think "vintage fraud" is widespread, and have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from - its vintage.
The test works by comparing the amount of carbon-12 and carbon-14 in grapes.
This image from the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope highlights the large and bright elliptical galaxy called ESO 306-17 in the southern sky. In this image, it appears that ESO 306-17 is surrounded by other galaxies but the bright galaxies at bottom left are thought to be in the foreground, not at the same distance in the sky. In reality, ESO 306-17 lies fairly abandoned in an enormous sea of dark matter and hot gas. (Credit: NASA, ESA and Michael West (ESO))
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 21, 2010) — Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17, is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky of a type known as a fossil group. Astronomers use this term to emphasize the isolated nature of these galaxies. However, are they like fossils -- the last remnants of a once active community -- or is it more sinister than that? Did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbors?
Being around a pretty woman can make men take more risks, a new study finds.
Researchers looked at the risk-taking behaviors of 96 young adult men, with an average age of nearly 22, by asking them to do both easy and difficult tricks on skateboards.
First, the young men performed the tricks in front of another man, then in front of a young, attractive female. (The attractiveness of the woman was independently assessed by 20 male raters.)
From The Independent: By tweaking our DNA, we could soon survive for hundreds of years – if we want to. Steve Connor reports on a breakthrough that has the science world divided.
A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.
If this work could ever be translated into humans, it would mean that we might one day see people living for 800 years. But is this ever going to be a realistic possibility?
Steve Jobs demonstrates the movie function of the new iPad with a scene from Pixar's Up at the launch of the tablet computer in San Francisco Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
From The Guardian:
It might be a while before Britain gets to see the iPad, but it's just weeks away from launch in the United States - and Apple is beginning to crank up the gears.
The latest move? The company is now accepting submissions for iPad applications to be released on April 3, the date when the gadget starts shipping. If developers submit their wares in the next week (the deadline is actually Saturday 27th of March), they'll get told whether they pass Apple's approval process - with an eye to being available through iTunes to iPad owners on day one.
The company plans to sell the 12C in 19 countries, with North America expected to account for around 30 to 40 per cent of the market.
From The Daily Mail:
A gull-winged 200mph supercar dubbed 'an F1 car for the road' was launched yesterday by UK racing specialists McLaren.
The cars will be made in a new £40million factory designed by Sir Norman Foster and will create 300 jobs.
The £150,000 McLaren MP4-12C is Britain's answer to Italy's legendary Ferrari and is the long-held dream of boss Ron Dennis to produce an 'affordable' supercar with the greenest credentials.
Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide (Image: Zap Art/Getty)
From New Scientist:
WHY jump in a cab to "follow that car" when an airborne drone could do the job for you? The US Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing a radar system which sees around corners and down into "urban canyons". DARPA hopes to be able to track vehicles across an entire city using just a few uncrewed aircraft.
Where's Pinky? NARF! Medical College of Georgia, via Physorg
From Popular Science:
Tests in mice show potential for reversing the slowdown in learning that comes with puberty.
Anyone who's tried to learn a second language knows that the earlier in life you start, the easier it is to learn. Now, a scientist at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center (SUNY) has not only discovered why learning becomes much harder after puberty, but also how to fix it. The SUNY team found that learning difficulty resulted from the proliferation of special chemical receptors during adolescence, and that the stress steroid THP could reverse the problem.
A Chinese policeman stands guard near Tiananmen Square in Beijing during the sandstorm. (AFP/Liu Jin)
From Times Online:
Tons of sand turned Beijing's sky orange as the strongest sandstorm this year hit northern China, a gritty reminder that the country's expanding deserts have led to a sharp increase in the storms.
The sky glowed yesterday and a thin dusting of sand covered Beijing, causing workers and tourists to cover their faces with masks in the vast Tiananmen Square. The city's weather bureau gave air quality a rare hazardous ranking.
Image: Effects of parameter variation on escape time distribution for the gKPR process. (A) Mean completion time versus ¸ and Æ for L=8. (B) Coefficient of variation CV2gKPR versus ¸ and Æ for L=8. (C,D) the same for L=16. (Credit: Image courtesy of Emory University)
From Science Daily:
ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2010) — Centuries ago, scientists began reducing the physics of the universe into a few, key laws described by a handful of parameters. Such simple descriptions have remained elusive for complex biological systems -- until now.
Emory biophysicist Ilya Nemenman has identified parameters for several biochemical networks that distill the entire behavior of these systems into simple equivalent dynamics. The discovery may hold the potential to streamline the development of drugs and diagnostic tools, by simplifying the research models.
Today is the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It is no guarantee of spring-like weather, but officially the season's start comes around at the same time each year nonetheless.
Well, sort of.
The first day of spring arrives on varying dates (from March 19-21) in different years for two reasons: Our year is not exactly an even number of days; and Earth's slightly noncircular orbit, plus the gravitational tug of the other planets, constantly changes our planet's orientation to the sun from year to year.
The invisibility cloak is the first to work in three dimensions, but has some way to go before it can make the USS Enterprise vanish. Photograph: Ronald Grant
Cloaking Device Makes Objects Invisible – To Infrared Light Anyway -- The Guardian
For now the device only makes objects invisible to infrared light, but it paves the way for a cloaking material that could hide vehicles, high-security facilities or unsightly buildings.
Scientists are a step closer to creating a Star Trek-style cloaking device after demonstrating a material that makes objects beneath it appear to vanish.
The material was used to hide a bump on a surface by interfering with the way light bounced off it, making it seem as though neither the cloak nor the bump was there. Read more ....
The Large Hadron Collider has broken its own record for high energy particle streams.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, said beams of protons circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 27-kilometre (17-mile) tunnel housing the LHC under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. That is three times more energy than it has ever achieved before.
Astute sits on the shiplift outside the Devonshire Dock Hall in Barrow-in-Furness, ready to be lowered into the dock. The three starboard torpedo tubes are visible on the front of the submarine
Defender Of The Realm: Britain's £1.2bn Submarine - And Typically, We Can't Afford It... -- The Daily Mail
This is the best submarine in the world. It is virtually undetectable, has reinvented the periscope and sonar, and doubles as a floating GCHQ. It also happens to be British. Its only weakness? At £1.2bn, we can't actually afford it
She could prowl the depths of the oceans without stopping for her entire 25-year lifespan, her sleek curves undetected. She generates her own oxygen and fresh water from the surrounding sea, never has to refuel and never needs to break the surface. Indeed, the only reasons for her to come up after 90 days on patrol are to restock with food and to help preserve the sanity of her crew.
My Comment: The Royal Navy ruled the oceans for a reason .... they developed and manufactured great ships and trained even better sailors. But in today's world money is more important than technology, well trained personnel, and having the best boat.
A million-dollar prize for solving one of toughest problems in mathematics has been awarded to a Russian mathematician, but the real puzzle is whether he'll accept it.
It will probably take another decade to perfect the sophisticated rocket and life-support technology needed to put a human on Mars. But once we’re there, NASA may use centuries-old technology to keep us from getting lost during a stroll.
A volcano in the area of the Eyjafallajoekull glacier in southern Iceland erupted overnight for the first time in 189 years, forcing more than 500 people to evacuate their homes.
The eruption took place just before midnight by the Eyjafjallajokull glacier, the fifth largest glacier in Iceland. The volcano, which is 1,666m high and has a crater 4km in diameter, is covered by a large ice cap.
Wind-generated electricity is growing rapidly in the United States but the pace still lags far behind that in China, the organizer of an industry conference in North Carolina said.
"With the right policies in place, we can see explosive growth...It's a global footrace," said Jeff Anthony, business development director of the American Wind Energy Association.
More Flawless Diamonds Diamonds are a laser's best friend ... at least diamonds better than this Wikimedia
From Popular Science:
Scientists need the diamonds to build the next generation of X-ray lasers .
Powerful X-ray lasers may allow scientists to image tiny drug molecules or even precisely target cancer cells, but the lasers require extremely high-quality mirrors to function well. Now researchers have created a nearly-flawless diamond that can do the job, according to Discovery News.
Ooof. This is why NASA designed the space shuttle to land like a plane.
Two space station crew members, American commander Jeff Williams and Russian flight engineer Maxim Suraev, landed their Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft in three feet of snow this morning on the steppes of Kazakhstan, finishing a five-and-a-half-month stay in orbit.
Non-avian dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, and now researchers have proven that this die-off didn't happen over a long period of time.
A detailed look at dinosaur bones, tracks and eggs located at 29 archaeological sites located in the Catalan Pyrenees reveals that there was a large diversity of dinosaur species living there just before the fatal K-T extinction event, which many scientists believe was caused by several large meteors hitting Earth.
This evolutionary tree shows dog breeds and gray wolves. (Credit: UCLA)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 18, 2010) — Dogs likely originated in the Middle East, not Asia or Europe, according to a new genetic analysis by an international team of scientists led by UCLA biologists.
The research appears March 17 in the advance online edition of the journal Nature.
Researchers are utilizing new technologies to help predict the strength and impacts of natural disasters. The image above, courtesy of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), depicts the energy radiating from the recent Chilean earthquake as well as the amplitude of the quake's resulting tsunami.
Nuclear missiles "on alert" could too easily be launched by mistake
From New Scientist:
IN THE next few weeks, President Barack Obama will publish his delayed Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), setting out the role nuclear weapons play in US defence. This is Obama's opportunity to end one of the most dangerous legacies of the cold war: the nuclear missiles the US and Russia keep ready to fly in minutes. The signs are that he is unlikely to take it.
This leaves the questions why does the US keep its nuclear weapons "on alert", and are they really needed?
Google is expected to announce on Monday that it will withdraw from China on April 10, according to a report in a Beijing-based newspaper that cited an unidentified sales associate who works with the company.
"I have received information saying that Google will leave China on April 10, but this information has not at present been confirmed by Google," the China Business News quoted the agent as saying. The report also said Google would reveal its plans for its China-based staff that day.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rare Earths Rare earth elements form a crucial part of everyday high-tech products.
From Popular Science:
On the sunnier side, rare earths could power a future generation of clean tech.
All those hybrid and electric cars, wind turbines and similar clean tech innovations may count for nothing if the U.S. cannot secure a supply of rare earth minerals. Ditto for other advanced telecommunications or defense technologies, scientists told a U.S. House subcommittee.
Virus Attempts to Steal Banking Passwords, Other Sensitive Information.
BOSTON (Reuters) - Hackers have flooded the Internet with virus-tainted spam that targets Facebook's estimated 400 million users in an effort to steal banking passwords and gather other sensitive information.
The emails tell recipients that the passwords on their Facebook accounts have been reset, urging them to click on an attachment to obtain new login credentials, according to anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc.
The galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 (known as the Bullet Cluster) lies 3.8 billion light-years away. It's one of hundreds that appear to be carried along by a mysterious cosmic flow. NASA/STScI/Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.
From Discovery News:
A structure, possibly another universe beyond the horizon of our own, appears to be pulling at our world.
The universe is not only expanding -- it's being swept along in the direction of constellations Centaurus and Hydra at a steady clip of one million miles per hour, pulled, perhaps, by the gravity of another universe.
Scientists have no idea what's tugging at the known world, except to say that whatever it is likely dates back to the fraction of the second between the universe's explosive birth 13.7 billion years ago and its inflation a split second later.
This artist's conception illustrates one of the most primitive supermassive black holes known (central black dot) at the core of a young, star-rich galaxy. Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have uncovered two of these early objects, dating back to about 13 billion years ago. The monstrous black holes are among the most distant known, and appear to be in the very earliest stages of formation, earlier than any observed so far. Unlike all other supermassive black holes probed to date, this primitive duo, called J0005-0006 and J0303-0019, lacks dust. As the drawing shows, gas swirls around a black hole in what is called an accretion disk. Usually, the accretion disk is surrounded by a dark doughnut-like dusty structure called a dust torus. But for the primitive black holes, the dust tori are missing and only gas disks are observed. This is because the early universe was clean as a whistle. Enough time had not passed for molecules to clump together into dust particles. Some black holes forming in this era thus started out lacking dust. As they grew, gobbling up more and more mass, they are thought to have accumulated dusty rings. This illustration also shows how supermassive black holes can distort space and light around them (see warped stars behind black hole). Stars from the galaxy can be seen sprinkled throughout, and distant mergers between other galaxies are illustrated in the background. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 18, 2010) — Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars all came to be.
A prescribed burn was conducted in July 2001 in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. The giant redwoods endured frequent fires from the yeas 800 to 1300. Human activity reduced fires in recent decades but now scientists have reintroduced fire to the ecosystem. Credit: Tony C. Caprio
From Live Science:
Ancient trees pack a record of ancient events. And now scientists have used 52 of the world's oldest trees — giant sequoia redwoods in California's western Sierra Nevada — to show that the region was plagued by drought and fire from the year 800 through the year 1300.
Scientists reconstructed a 3,000-year history of fire by dating fire scars on the inland sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park. Individual giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years.
Image: Paper for airplanes: This paper (top), made from layers of tiny clay discs and a polymer (seen under the microscope at bottom), might be used as a strong, lightweight coating for buildings and airplanes. Credit: Andreas Walther
From Technology Review:
A strong material inspired by abalone shells could be applied over large areas.
For decades, materials scientists have looked to naturally existing composites as inspiration for tough, lightweight materials that could lighten vehicles. Such materials could save on fuel costs, protect airplanes, and be used in engine turbines that run more efficiently. The material that lines abalone shells, called nacre, has been of particular interest: it's lightweight and strong, yet shatter-resistant. But mimicking the microscale structures responsible for its properties has been difficult, and hasn't resulted in materials that can be manufactured on a large scale.
Study: Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years.
