A Chinese astronomer from the University of St Andrews has fine-tuned Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of gravity, creating a ‘simple’ theory which could solve a dark mystery that has baffled astrophysicists for three-quarters of a century.

A new law for gravity, developed by Dr. Hong Sheng Zhao and his Belgian collaborator Dr. Benoit Famaey of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), aims to prove whether Einstein’s theory was in fact correct and whether the astronomical mystery

Oil and oil products spill often and in various places. These are plots in oil production areas and pipeline breaking locations and places of tanker wracks or crashes of consists, which carry oil products. At best, oil spillage falls on hard soil: it can be collected and somehow refined or, at the worst, buried. The case is much worse if the spillage takes place on water.

The oil film spreads out quickly to large distances, and it is very uneasy to collect. A thick film is removed by s

Ocean temperatures might have risen even higher during the last century if it weren’t for volcanoes that spewed ashes and aerosols into the upper atmosphere, researchers have found. The eruptions also offset a large percentage of sea level rise caused by human activity.

Using 12 new state-of-the-art climate models, the researchers found that ocean warming and sea level rise in the 20th century were substantially reduced by the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indones

Rainmakers and civil servants, specialists and farmers understand water policies in markedly different ways. This is why international policy instruments for managing water resources do not succeed, and the consequence is water shortage. This is shown in a dissertation in political science from Göteborg University in Sweden.

Every year five million people die because of the lack of clean water. This is not because we lack the knowledge to manage water or even because there is not

Two schools in Leipzig are taking part in a new EU project called “Play with Water – From Waste to Resource”. Scientists from the Centre for Environmental Research Leipzig-Halle (UFZ) are involved, along with partners from a wide range of research establishments in Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Slovenia. The concept was developed as part of the EU’s Science and Society Action Plan.

The target group for this project from the Training and Demonstration Centre for Decentralised Sewa

Bournemouth University’s School of Conservation Sciences has been awarded a major research grant to study the restoration of forest landscapes in Latin America.

The £1.2 million (1,720,000 Euro) grant from the European Commission’s INCO-DEV programme is one of the largest awards ever received by the University. The project will bring researchers from Bournemouth together with colleagues from organisations in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Spain and Italy over the next three years

Genomewide evolutionary changes in farmed salmon adds further threats to wild populations

There is growing concern about the threats that farmed Atlantic salmon escapees constitute to wild salmon populations.

Consumers and environmentalists are concerned about farmed salmon yet heritable changes that have accumulated in farmed strains at the genetic level are largely unknown.

In new research published in the journal Molecular Ecology, researchers have found scie

Icy chunks of frozen methane and water are not responsible for the periodic increases in atmospheric methane recorded in Greenland ice cores, according to a Penn State geoscientist.

The ice core samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project II cover the last 40,000 years and present a picture of the Earth’s climate over that time span.

“There are two hypotheses for the cause of the rapid increase in methane seen in the ice core records,” says Dr. Todd Sowers, resear

Tree rings and ice cores also help scientists build up picture of global warming

The temperature of the northern hemisphere has increased over a larger area in the last century than at any time in the past millennium a report published in Science reveals this week.

The study finds that the number of ’hot spots’ has increased dramatically in the Northern Hemisphere in the last century compared to the past 1200 years ¨C adding to the growing evidence of wide-scale

The temperature of the northern hemisphere has increased over a larger area in the last century than at any time in the past millennium a report published in Science reveals this week.

The study finds that the number of “hot spots” has increased dramatically in the Northern Hemisphere in the last century compared to the past 1200 years – adding to the growing evidence of wide-scale global warming.

Dr Tim Osborn and Prof Keith Briffa, of the Climatic Research Unit team

A unifying physics principle that describes design in nature predicts, in surprisingly straightforward fashion, the basic features of global circulation and climate, according to researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and the University of Evora in Portugal. They said the new approach to climate may have important implications for forecasting environmental change.

The researchers found that the “constructal theory” can predict the global circulation that

Geologists have learned that the height of the Tibetan Plateau, a vast, elevated region of central Asia sometimes called “the roof of the world,” has remained remarkably constant for at least 35 million years.

David Rowley from the University of Chicago and Brian Currie of Miami University in Ohio report their finding in the Feb. 9 issue of the journal Nature.

Before their last expedition to Tibet, the geologists expected to find evidence that the plateau was rising

A recent decrease in Rocky Mountain snowpack has slowed the release of heat-trapping carbon dioxide gases from forest soils into the atmosphere during the dead of winter, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

Professor Russell Monson of CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department said the lack of snow has decreased the winter insulation of the soils, cooling them and slowing the metabolism of microbes that release large amounts of CO2. Bu

In the clouds above Darwin, Australia, pilots guided by a team of international climate scientists are now one week into a series of carefully orchestrated flights to obtain key in situ data about tropical clouds. Preliminary results obtained from instrumentation on the Proteus –a space-age aircraft equipped with a suite of highly sophisticated sensors — reveal superior images of ice crystals in high-altitude tropical cirrus clouds.

“These images, combined with data from other air

If the world continues to burn greenhouse gases, California may have an increased risk of winter floods and summer water shortages, even within the same year. This scenario may be more severe in future El Niño years.

New research by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists shows that global warming is likely to change river flows in ways that may result in both increased flood risk and water shortages. The predictions assume atmospheric carbon dioxide concentratio

Something wicked this way comes, if you’re a frog or salamander living near El Cope, Panama.

An outbreak of an infectious disease called chytridiomycosis, attributed to the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has infected and caused rapid die-offs in eight families of Panamanian amphibians, scientists report in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

A survey of amphibian populations in central Panama has uncovered a case of chyt