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Lull in ship noise after Sept. 11 attacks eased stress on right whales
Published Feb 8, 2012 - 11:16:23 AM
Exposure to low-frequency ship noise may be associated with chronic stress in whales, according to a study published today in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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CU-Boulder study shows global glaciers, ice caps, shedding billions of tons of mass annually
Published Feb 8, 2012 - 11:14:30 AM
Earth's glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding roughly 150 billion tons of ice annually, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.
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NIST report on Texas fire urges firefighters to consider wind effects
Published Feb 8, 2012 - 11:13:27 AM
Wind conditions at a fire scene can make a critical difference on the behavior of the blaze and the safety of firefighters, even indoors, according to a new report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The findings confirm earlier NIST research, but they take on a particular immediacy because they are based on detailed computer models of a tragic 2009 residential fire in Houston, Texas, that claimed the lives of two firefighters.
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Satellite telephony is unsafe
Published Feb 8, 2012 - 11:11:51 AM
Satellite telephony was thought to be secure against eavesdropping. Researchers at the Horst Görtz Institute for IT-Security (HGI) at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) have cracked the encryption algorithms of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which is used globally for satellite telephones, and revealed significant weaknesses. In less than an hour, and with simple equipment, they found the crypto key which is needed to intercept telephone conversations. Using open-source software and building on their previous research results, they were able to exploit the security weaknesses.
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Sea monster is world's oldest living thing
Published Feb 8, 2012 - 7:14:53 AM
It's big, it's old and it lives under the sea and now an international research collaboration with The University of Western Australia's Ocean's Institute has confirmed an ancient seagrass to hold the secrets of the oldest living organism on earth.
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VLT takes most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula
Published Feb 8, 2012 - 6:55:51 AM
Deep in the heart of the southern Milky Way lies a stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula. It is about 7500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina (The Keel) [1]. This cloud of glowing gas and dust is one of the closest incubators of very massive stars to the Earth and includes several of the brightest and heaviest stars known. One of them, the mysterious and highly unstable star Eta Carinae, was the second brightest star in the entire night sky for several years in the 1840s and is likely to explode as a supernova in the near future, by astronomical standards. The Carina Nebula is a perfect laboratory for astronomers studying the violent births and early lives of stars.
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Warning! Collision imminent!
Published Feb 7, 2012 - 9:16:00 AM
When you are about to collide into something and manage to swerve away just in the nick of time, what exactly is happening in your brain? A new study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro, McGill University shows how the brain processes visual information to figure out when something is moving towards you or when you are about to head into a collision. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), provides vital insight into our sense of vision and a greater understanding of the brain.
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Studying Nature's Rhythms: Soundscape Ecologists Spawn New Field
Published Feb 7, 2012 - 8:06:17 AM
Geophony. Biophony. Anthrophony.
Unfamiliar words. But they shouldn't be. We're surrounded by them morning, noon and night, say ecologist Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University and colleagues.
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Odds of living a very long life lower than formerly predicted
Published Feb 7, 2012 - 7:33:31 AM
Americans' chances of reaching extreme old age are much lower than previously thought, new research shows.
The findings by a team of demographers at the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago contradict a long-held belief that mortality rates level off above age 80. They also explain why the number of Americans age 100 and above is less than half of what the Census Bureau predicted as recently as six years ago.
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UNH Ocean Scientists Shed New Light on Mariana Trench
Published Feb 7, 2012 - 7:27:05 AM
An ocean mapping expedition has shed new light on deepest place on Earth, the 2,500-kilometer long Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean near Guam. Using a multibeam echo sounder, state-of-the-art equipment for mapping the ocean floor, scientists from the University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center found four "bridges" spanning the trench and measured its deepest point with greater precision than ever before.
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Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience
Published Feb 6, 2012 - 7:08:02 AM
When a friend tells you she had a rough day, do you feel sandpaper under your fingers? The brain may be replaying sensory experiences to help understand common metaphors, new research suggests.
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Tree rings may underestimate climate response to volcanic eruptions
Published Feb 6, 2012 - 6:51:58 AM
Some climate cooling caused by past volcanic eruptions may not be evident in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature change because large enough temperature drops lead to greatly shortened or even absent growing seasons, according to climate researchers, who compared tree-ring temperature reconstructions with model simulations of past temperature changes.
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Surface of Mars an unlikely place for life after 600 million year drought, say scientists
Published Feb 3, 2012 - 7:56:51 AM
Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet's surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team's analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012.
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New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby cool star
Published Feb 3, 2012 - 6:35:22 AM
An international team of scientists led by Carnegie's Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.
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Planets Circling Around Twin Suns
Published Feb 3, 2012 - 6:33:40 AM
In the last two decades, the study of extrasolar planets — those that lie outside our own solar system — has become one of the most important fields of astrophysics. Now a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) team that includes Prof. Tsevi Mazeh of Tel Aviv University's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Director of the Wise Observatory has discovered two new planets, named Kepler-34 and Kepler-35, each of which revolves around its own double suns. Together with Kepler-16, discovered a few months ago, there are now three such known systems in the galaxy.
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Google Earth Ocean Terrain Receives Major Update
Published Feb 3, 2012 - 6:11:38 AM
Internet information giant Google updated ocean data in its Google Earth application this week, reflecting new bathymetry data assembled by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, NOAA researchers and many other ocean mapping groups from around the world.
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Classic portrait of a barred spiral galaxy
Published Feb 3, 2012 - 6:09:58 AM
Most spiral galaxies in the Universe have a bar structure in their centre, and Hubble's image of NGC 1073 offers a particularly clear view of one of these. Galaxies' star-filled bars are thought to emerge as gravitational density waves funnel gas toward the galactic centre, supplying the material to create new stars. The transport of gas can also feed the supermassive black holes that lurk in the centres of almost every galaxy.
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Do black holes help stars form?
Published Feb 2, 2012 - 10:00:06 AM
The centre of just about every galaxy is thought to host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around them. They had been thought to hinder the birth of stars, but now an international team of astronomers studying the nearby galaxy Centaurus A has found quite the opposite: a black hole that seems to be helping stars to form. The team, led by Dr Stanislav Shabala of the University of Tasmania, Dr Mark Crockett of the University of Oxford, and Dr Sugata Kaviraj of Imperial College, London, publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Sandia tool determines value of solar photovoltaic power systems
Published Feb 2, 2012 - 9:58:15 AM
Consistent appraisals of homes and businesses outfitted with photovoltaic (PV) installations are a real challenge for the nation's real estate industry, but a new tool developed by Sandia National Laboratories and Solar Power Electric™ and licensed by Sandia addresses that issue. Sandia scientists, in partnership with Jamie Johnson of Solar Power Electric™, have developed PV ValueTM, an electronic form to standardize appraisals. Funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the tool will provide appraisers, real estate agents and mortgage underwriters with more accurate values for PV systems.
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UNH scientists: Sun delivered curveball of powerful radiation at Earth
Published Feb 2, 2012 - 9:31:00 AM
A potent follow-up solar flare, which occurred Friday (Jan. 27, 2012), just days after the Sun launched the biggest coronal mass ejection (CME) seen in nearly a decade, delivered a powerful radiation punch to Earth's magnetic field despite the fact that it was aimed away from our planet.
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NASA's GCPEX Mission: What We Don't Know about Snow
Published Feb 2, 2012 - 7:09:43 AM
redicting the future is always a tricky business -- just watch a TV weather report. Weather forecasts have come a long way, but almost every season there's a snowstorm that seems to come out of nowhere, or one that's forecast as 'the big one' that turns out to be a total bust.
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Honey could be effective at treating and preventing wound infections
Published Feb 1, 2012 - 9:22:39 AM
Manuka honey could help clear chronic wound infections and even prevent them from developing in the first place, according to a new study published in Microbiology. The findings provide further evidence for the clinical use of manuka honey to treat bacterial infections in the face of growing antibiotic resistance.
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Mouse to elephant? Just wait 24 million generations
Published Feb 1, 2012 - 8:46:55 AM
Scientists have for the first time measured how fast large-scale evolution can occur in mammals, showing it takes 24 million generations for a mouse-sized animal to evolve to the size of an elephant.
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Earth's Energy Budget Remained Out of Balance Despite Unusually Low Solar Activity
Published Jan 31, 2012 - 6:17:46 AM
A new NASA study underscores the fact that greenhouse gases generated by human activity -- not changes in solar activity -- are the primary force driving global warming.
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Building a smarter internet
Published Jan 30, 2012 - 9:59:24 AM
The proliferation of smart phones, smart TVs and smart cars could lead to 50 billion internet-connected devices by 2020. EU-funded scientists are working hard to create a smarter internet to cope with this massive growth.
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Technology that translates content to the Internet protocol of the future
Published Jan 30, 2012 - 9:56:33 AM
The protocol that any device uses to connect to Internet, IPv4, (Internet Protocol version 4), has a problem: due to the Web's tremendous growth, all of its addresses have recently run out, worldwide. According to the experts, the solution lies in IPv6, a protocol that is in the early phases of implementation and that is expected to eventually replace its predecessor. However, there is another problem: the two protocols are incompatible. "Machines that only have IPv6 cannot communicate with those that only have IPv4, which is the case with the majority of those being used to connect to the Internet today, and vice versa", explains Marcelo Bagnulo, professor of the NETCOM research group at UC3M, where a solution to the problem has been developed.
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Space Weather Center to Add World's First 'Ensemble Forecasting' Capability
Published Jan 30, 2012 - 9:52:13 AM
After years of relative somnolence, the sun is beginning to stir. By the time it's fully awake in about 20 months, the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., charged with researching and tracking solar activity, will have at their disposal a greatly enhanced forecasting capability.
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UCLA astronomers solve mystery of vanishing electrons
Published Jan 30, 2012 - 9:51:08 AM
UCLA researchers have explained the puzzling disappearing act of energetic electrons in Earth's outer radiation belt, using data collected from a fleet of orbiting spacecraft.
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Geoengineering and global food supply
Published Jan 30, 2012 - 7:22:02 AM
Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people. New research led by Carnegie's Julia Pongratz examines the potential effects that geoengineering the climate could have on global food production and concludes that sunshade geoengineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security. Their work was published online by Nature Climate Change January 22.
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Unusual volcanic episode rapidly triggered Little Ice Age, researchers find
Published Jan 30, 2012 - 6:12:19 AM
New evidence from northern ice sheets suggests that volcanic eruptions triggered the multiple-century cool spell known as the Little Ice Age, and pinpoints the start of the climate shift to the final decades of the 13th century. Researchers have long known that the Little Ice Age began sometime after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century. But, estimates of its onset have ranged from the 13th to the 16th century.
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