http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Leaders of the C40 Mayors Summit on climate change said Wednesday the group had reached a financing agreement with the World Bank to help the world's major cities better adapt to climate change. http://phys.org/news226161207.html Space & Earth Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:33:36 EST news226161207 Australian meteorologists on Wednesday declared La Nina, the disruptive weather pattern behind floods and cyclones that brought death and destruction this year, to have ended. http://phys.org/news225548679.html Space & Earth Wed, 25 May 2011 13:50:01 EST news225548679 Shortly after midnight, NASA sent one last plea to the rover Spirit, mired in a sand trap on the surface of Mars. http://phys.org/news225470926.html Space & Earth Tue, 24 May 2011 15:49:23 EST news225470926 The closest gathering of four bright planets in decades will be on display low in the eastern sky before dawn during May. http://phys.org/news223887637.html Space & Earth Fri, 06 May 2011 08:04:00 EST news223887637 For the first time, scientists have an almost complete sky map of high-energy cosmic rays. http://phys.org/news223614848.html Physics Tue, 03 May 2011 04:14:26 EST news223614848 In a study to be published in the April 21st issue of Science magazine, researchers at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science report their findings that the ozone hole, which is located over the South Pole, has affected the entire circulation of the Southern Hemisphere all the way to the equator. While previous work has shown that the ozone hole is changing the atmospheric flow in the high latitudes, the Columbia Engineering paper, "Impact of Polar Ozone Depletion on Subtropical Precipitation," demonstrates that the ozone hole is able to influence the tropical circulation and increase rainfall at low latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. This is the first time that ozone depletion, an upper atmospheric phenomenon confined to the polar regions, has been linked to climate change from the Pole to the equator. http://phys.org/news222613588.html Space & Earth Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:06:45 EST news222613588 (PhysOrg.com) -- Australian scientists have reported the first known detrimental impact of southern hemisphere ocean warming on a fish species. http://phys.org/news222333719.html Space & Earth Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:26:30 EST news222333719 (PhysOrg.com) -- A team of scientists from Aberystwyth University, the University of Exeter and Stockholm University, led by Welsh scientist and Professor Neil Glasser, have released at study published in Nature Geoscience showing that the glaciers of Patagonia in South America are melting at a much faster rate than originally thought. http://phys.org/news221140470.html Space & Earth Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:55:01 EST news221140470 ESA's Mars Express has returned new images of an elongated impact crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. Located just south of the Huygens basin, it could have been carved out by a train of projectiles striking the planet at a shallow angle. http://phys.org/news218455722.html Space & Earth Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:10:07 EST news218455722 Climate researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association (AWI) expand a prevalent theory regarding the development of ice ages. In the current issue of the journal Nature three physicists from AWI's working group "Dynamics of the Palaeoclimate" present new calculations on the connection between natural insolation and long-term changes in global climate activity. Up to now the presumption was that temperature fluctuations in Antarctica, which have been reconstructed for the last million years on the basis of ice cores, were triggered by the global effect of climate changes in the northern hemisphere. The new study shows, however, that major portions of the temperature fluctuations can be explained equally well by local climate changes in the southern hemisphere. http://phys.org/news218294687.html Space & Earth Wed, 02 Mar 2011 13:25:17 EST news218294687 A powerful solar eruption that triggered a huge geomagnetic storm has disturbed radio communications and could disrupt electrical power grids, radio and satellite communication in the next days, NASA said. http://phys.org/news217140403.html Space & Earth Thu, 17 Feb 2011 04:47:50 EST news217140403 (PhysOrg.com) -- A team of scientists studying Antarctic ice cores have found surprising evidence of a fluctuating pattern of carbon monoxide concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere caused by biomass burning in the Southern Hemisphere over the past 650 years. http://phys.org/news210529446.html Space & Earth Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:24:22 EST news210529446 (PhysOrg.com) -- In the first comprehensive global survey of temperature trends in major lakes, NASA researchers determined Earth's largest lakes have warmed during the past 25 years in response to climate change. http://phys.org/news209750548.html Space & Earth Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:02:50 EST news209750548 (PhysOrg.com) -- Like a cosmic light bulb on a dimmer switch, Saturn emitted gradually less energy each year from 2005 to 2009, according to observations by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. http://phys.org/news208629841.html Space & Earth Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:44:26 EST news208629841 Weather systems in the Southern and Northern hemispheres will respond differently to global warming, according to an MIT atmospheric scientist's analysis that suggests the warming of the planet will affect the availability of energy to fuel extratropical storms, or large-scale weather systems that occur at Earth's middle latitudes. The resulting changes will depend on the hemisphere and season, the study found. http://phys.org/news207239683.html Space & Earth Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:34:59 EST news207239683 Scientists returned this week to the Southern Hemisphere where NASA's Operation IceBridge mission is set to begin its second year of airborne surveys over Antarctica. The mission monitors the region's changing sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers. http://phys.org/news207218618.html Space & Earth Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:44:04 EST news207218618 (PhysOrg.com) -- A few weeks ago, a group of scientists from Australia posted a study at arXiv.org that showed evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be a constant. If the fine-structure constant does vary throughout the universe as their data seems to show, it would mean that the laws of physics also vary throughout the universe, with huge implications. But over the past few weeks, a few blogs by physicists not involved in the study have offered some early criticism of the authors' results. http://phys.org/news206853030.html Physics Thu, 21 Oct 2010 04:11:03 EST news206853030 Scientists have determined that ESA's Rosetta mission needs to deliver its lander to a site in the southern hemisphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. A site in this region will be the safest and most scientifically interesting according to the recent study. http://phys.org/news204810971.html Space & Earth Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:56:32 EST news204810971 No-one but specialists using genetic methods can distinguish one dark septate fungal root endophyte from another. An analysis of their distribution in the northern hemisphere is now available for the first time -- and a mystery is afoot. http://phys.org/news203245027.html Biology Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:57:32 EST news203245027 As the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned. But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the north, Antarctica was heating up. For the two decades since ice core records revealed that Europe was cooling at the same time Antarctica was warming over this thousand-year period, scientists have looked for an explanation. http://phys.org/news203171437.html Space & Earth Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:30:48 EST news203171437 (PhysOrg.com) -- One of the most controversial questions in cosmology is why the fundamental constants of nature seem fine-tuned for life. One of these fundamental constants is the fine-structure constant, or alpha, which is the coupling constant for the electromagnetic force and equal to about 1/137.0359. If alpha were just 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars wouldn't be able to make carbon and oxygen, which would have made it impossible for life as we know it to exist. Now, results from a new study show that alpha seems to have varied a tiny bit in different directions of the universe billions of years ago, being slightly smaller in the northern hemisphere and slightly larger in the southern hemisphere. One intriguing possible implication is that the fine-structure constant is continuously varying in space, and seems fine-tuned for life in our neighborhood of the universe. http://phys.org/news202921592.html Physics Mon, 06 Sep 2010 05:23:48 EST news202921592 Imagine loosening the screw-top of a soda bottle and hearing the carbon dioxide begin to escape. Then imagine taking the cap off quickly, and seeing the beverage foam and fizz out of the bottle. Then, imagine the pressure equalizing and the beverage being ready to drink. http://phys.org/news201956899.html Space & Earth Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:00:10 EST news201956899 After more than a decade of monitoring the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, scientists have released the first count of one of the world's most endangered group of whales. http://phys.org/news197133645.html Biology Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:50:01 EST news197133645 Weather systems that become tropical cyclones go through a couple of names before they mature, just like people with nicknames. Such is the case with Cyclone 24S in the Southern Indian Ocean that was just renamed Tropical Storm Sean. http://phys.org/news191247771.html Space & Earth Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:40:01 EST news191247771 ESA's Venus Express has returned the clearest indication yet that Venus is still geologically active. Relatively young lava flows have been identified by the way they emit infrared radiation. The finding suggests the planet remains capable of volcanic eruptions. http://phys.org/news189959182.html Space & Earth Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:33:38 EST news189959182 Tropical Storm "Robyn" didn't have to fly south for the northern hemisphere winter, like the birds (Robins), it formed in the southern hemisphere this past weekend in the Southern Indian Ocean. Infrared satellite imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite revealed that the storm's strong thunderstorms and heavy rainfall are safely "nested" over open waters. http://phys.org/news189705025.html Space & Earth Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:50:40 EST news189705025 (PhysOrg.com) -- NASA scientists analyzing 30 years of satellite data have found that the amount of ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching Earth's surface has increased markedly over the last three decades. Most of the increase has occurred in the mid-and-high latitudes, and there's been little or no increase in tropical regions. http://phys.org/news187966732.html Space & Earth Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:59:09 EST news187966732 (PhysOrg.com) -- While a huge earthquake off the coast of Chile triggered a tsunami that moved at the speed of a jet aircraft across the Pacific Ocean Feb. 27, the event was smaller scientists expected, said a University of Colorado at Boulder earthquake expert. http://phys.org/news186687776.html Space & Earth Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:10:03 EST news186687776 An asteroid strike may not only account for the demise of ocean and land life 65 million years ago, but the fireball's path and the resulting dust, darkness and toxic metal contamination may explain the geographic unevenness of extinctions and recovery, according to Penn State geoscientists. http://phys.org/news186661791.html Space & Earth Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:30:40 EST news186661791 A wildfire towering up to 18 metres (60 feet) high bore down on homes in Australia's western Outback on Monday, officials said, urging residents to flee. http://phys.org/news186653170.html Space & Earth Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:40:01 EST news186653170