Every year, trade winds over the Sahara Desert sweep up huge plumes of mineral dust, transporting hundreds of teragrams—enough to fill 10 million dump trucks—across North Africa and over the Atlantic Ocean. This dust ...
Reporting this week (Wednesday Nov. 23) in the journal Nature an international team led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explains that present-day thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier, one of the largest and fastest ...
Satellites are keeping track of late-season Tropical Storm Otto as it threatens Central America. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of Otto as it was briefly strengthening into a hurricane.
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from France, the U.S. and Italy has found evidence from the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that sensors that measure changes in gravity might offer a way to warn people of impending disaster faster ...
The Northeastern coast of the USA could be struck by more frequent and more powerful hurricanes in the future due to shifting weather patterns, according to new research.
As Tropical Storm Otto formed in the southwestern Caribbean north of Panama on Nov. 21 the Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite analyzed the strengthening storm.
A new study of the temporary slowdown in the global average surface temperature warming trend observed between 1998 and 2013 concludes the phenomenon represented a redistribution of energy within the Earth system, with Earth's ...
NOAA/NASA's Suomi NPP satellite captured this image of the fires that continue to blaze in the southeastern United States with no end in sight. There are several fires visible. Two are fires that are listed on the Inciweb ...
The Beijing metropolitan region (BMR) often suffers from heavy rainfall events. The complex topography with the Yan Mountains to the north and the Taihang Mountains to the west, as well as the diverse underlying urban surfaces, ...
A rare microbe that was once thought to be insignificant has turned out to be one of the most abundant single-celled hunters in the ocean, and a team of researchers led by UBC have captured the first glimpse of these elusive ...
In 2015 alone, residents of Oklahoma felt the earth move beneath them a total of 907 times, as an unprecedented number of magnitude three or higher earthquakes racked the state. While Oklahoma has historically experienced ...
Around 300 million years ago, the landmass that is now North America collided with Gondwana, a supercontinent comprised of present-day Africa and South America. That clash of continents lifted tons of rock high above the ...
Icebergs contribute more meltwater to Greenland's fjords than previously thought, losing up to half of their volume as they move through the narrow inlets, according to new research.
Most of the extra heat trapped by human-generated emissions is ending up in the oceans. But tracking the temperature of the world's oceans to monitor the change is trickier than it might seem. While satellites monitor surface ...
The Multi-Slit Optimized Spectrometer (MOS) prototype instrument is an airborne sensor designed to demonstrate and validate the multislit concept for hyperspectral ocean color retrievals with real-world scenes. The instrument ...
The NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite captured this image of a spate of fires in the Central Valley of California. They are not listed on the CAL FIRE website which makes careful note of wildfires across the state whether or ...
Long-term weather data is the backbone of almost all research into climate change and variability. The recovery of historical instrumental data is a well-established practice in the Northern Hemisphere, where observations ...
Operation IceBridge, NASA's airborne survey of changes in polar ice, is closing in on the end of its eighth consecutive Antarctic deployment, and will likely tie its 2012 campaign record for the most research flights carried ...
Pioneering new insights into why high concentrations of some of the most rare and desirable natural elements - vital for the production of vital environmental, digital and security technologies - have been revealed.
Slow moving frontal systems draped over Hispaniola and a tropical wave recently caused heavy rainfall that led to wide spread flooding over the northern Dominican Republic. NASA analyzed that heavy rainfall using data from ...
In some parts of western Canada, small-to-moderate earthquakes have been induced by oil and gas hydraulic fracturing operations. In Alberta, this type of induced seismicity is mainly concentrated within an area located about ...
For decades, marine chemists have faced an elusive paradox. The surface waters of the world's oceans are supersaturated with the greenhouse gas methane, yet most species of microbes that can generate the gas can't survive ...
Way before trees or lichens evolved, soils on Earth were alive, as revealed by a close examination of microfossils in the desert of northwestern Australia, reports a team of University of Oregon researchers.
Few Americans may be aware of it, but in 1952 a killer fog that contained pollutants covered London for five days, causing breathing problems and killing thousands of residents. The exact cause and nature of the fog has ...
A paper published in Nature Communications by Virginia Tech researchers confirms a major feature in the formation of large igneous provinces—massive worldwide volcanic eruptions that created incredibly high volumes of lava ...
A new study found that rainfall over land in the subtropics - including in the southeastern U.S. - will not decline as much as it does over oceans in response to increased greenhouse gases. The study challenges our previous ...
Scientists analyzing a volcanic eruption at a mid-ocean ridge under the Pacific have come up with a somewhat contrarian explanation for what initiated it. Many scientists say undersea volcanism is triggered mainly by upwelling ...
Stanford geophysicists have compiled the most detailed maps yet of the geologic forces controlling the locations, types and magnitudes of earthquakes in Texas and Oklahoma.
Humans have always been frightened and fascinated by lightning. This month, NASA is scheduled to launch a new satellite that will provide the first nonstop, high-tech eye on lightning over the North American section of the ...
Australia shifts and tilts back and forth by several millimeters each year because of changes to the Earth's center of mass, according to a new study. The findings could help scientists better track the precise location of ...
The Alps are steadily "growing" by about one to two millimeters per year. Likewise, the formerly glaciated subcontinents of North America and Scandinavia are also undergoing constant upward movement. This is due to the fact ...
Understanding how carbon dissolves in water at the molecular level under extreme conditions is critical to understanding the Earth's deep carbon cycle—a process that ultimately influences global climate change.
A new study by University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science researchers found that the Indian Ocean's Agulhas Current is getting wider rather than strengthening. The findings, which have important ...
Scientists have found a key indicator in determining whether the presence of carbon, found in the Earth's mantle, is derived from continental crust - a step toward better understanding the history of crustal formation on ...
Scientists from the University of Bristol and partner universities in Germany, France, Canada and Wales, have discovered a huge magmatic lake, 15 kilometres below a dormant volcano in Bolivia, South America.
(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers has run multiple global climate computer simulations multiple times and has used the simulation results to estimate the local impact of rising sea levels on coastal cities ...
When you've got to go, but you're out there in space, zipped up in a spacesuit, with no toilet in sight and a crew of other astronauts around, what do you do?
In science, sometimes the best discoveries come when you're exploring something else entirely. That's the case with recent findings from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where a research team has ...
Graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon in sheets just one atom in thick, has been the subject of widespread research, in large part because of its unique combination of strength, electrical conductivity, and chemical ...
The claws of coconut crabs have the strongest pinching force of any crustacean, according to a study published November 23, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Shin-ichiro Oka from Okinawa Churashima Foundation, Japan, ...
People have a remarkable ability to remember and recall events from the past, even when those events didn't hold any particular importance at the time they occurred. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology ...
A groundbreaking study of the virosphere of the most populous animals - those without backbones such as insects, spiders and worms and that live around our houses - has uncovered 1445 viruses, revealing people have only scratched ...
A naturally occurring predatory bacterium is able to work with the immune system to clear multi-drug resistant Shigella infections in zebrafish, according to a study published today in Current Biology.
Piezoelectric sensors measure changes in pressure, acceleration, temperature, strain or force and are used in a vast array of devices important to everyday life. However, these sensors often can be limited by the "white noise" ...
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a vaccine that blocks the pain-numbing effects of the opioid drugs oxycodone (oxy) and hydrocodone (hydro) in animal models. The vaccine also appears to decrease ...
In the age of WikiLeaks, Russian hacks and increased government surveillance, many computer users are feeling increasingly worried about how best to protect their personal information—even if they aren't guarding state ...
Researchers have revealed new atomic-scale details about pesky deposits that can stop or slow chemical reactions vital to fuel production and other processes. This disruption to reactions is known as deactivation or poisoning.
A study co-led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has found that people with genes for high educational achievement tend to marry, and have children with, people with similar DNA.
The study, published as the cover article in BioMed Central's Avian Research, led by the Earlham Institute and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, explores the phylogenetic relationship between ...
Despite what you might think, evolution rarely happens because something is good for a species. Instead, natural selection favours genetic variants that are good for the individuals that possess them. This leads to a much ...
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the Universities of Roehampton and Birmingham in the U.K. has found a unique way to measure the energy spent by tree-dwelling apes when faced with gaps in a jungle canopy. In their ...
Although recent election coverage may suggest otherwise, research shows that people are more likely to use positive words than negative words on the whole in their communications. Behavioral scientists have extensively documented ...
How can quantum information be stored as long as possible? An important step forward in the development of quantum memories has been achieved by a research team of TU Wien.
An enterprising researcher from The University of Manchester has developed a prototype tool that could help transform the lives of the blind and visually impaired.
Men and women don't communicate much differently from each other, at least when they get the same training and are working on the same type of written assignment. The findings come amid frequent studies that have discovered ...
Black light does more than make posters glow. Cornell researchers have developed a chemical tool to control inflammation that is activated by ultraviolet (UV) light.
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis isolated an enzyme that controls the levels of two plant hormones simultaneously, linking the molecular pathways for growth and defense.
Artificial muscles—materials that contract and expand somewhat like muscle fibers do—can have many applications, from robotics to components in the automobile and aviation industries. Now, MIT researchers have come up ...
The population of wild koalas in the southeast portion of Australia's Queensland state has plunged by 80 percent in less than two decades, but researchers are offering a simple plan to save them. They can sum it up in three ...