Growing a forest might sound like a good idea to combat global warming, since trees draw carbon dioxide from the air and release cool water from their leaves. But they also absorb sunlight, warming the air in the process. According to a new study from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, planting forests at certain latitudes could make the Earth warmer. Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira will present the work at the American Geophysical Union Fal
In findings illustrating the difficulty of developing an AIDS vaccine, UCLA AIDS Institute researchers report the immune systems in two HIV-positive identical twins responded to the infection in different ways.
Detailed in the Dec. 5 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Virology, the findings show that the body’s defenses against the virus are random rather than genetically determined.
The researchers followed the cases of male twins who were infected shortly after
Surveys of three streams in the Russian River watershed show the first encouraging signs that a ground-breaking recovery effort is making headway rescuing coho salmon from the brink of extinction in part of its historic California range.
Recently completed snorkeling and electrofishing surveys estimate survival of more than 12,000 young fingerlings released last spring into Palmer, Sheephouse and Gray creeks at 54, 60 and 71 percent, respectively.
“We’re thrilled to see
Planting trees across the United States and Europe to absorb some of the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels may just outweigh the positive effects of sequestering that CO².
New climate modeling research from LLNL and the Carnegie Institution shows that northern temperate forests (top) may contribute to global warming, while tropical forests (bottom) can help keep global temperatures cool. (Click here to download a high-resolution image.)
In theory, gro
Soccer-ball-shaped “buckyballs” are the most famous players on the nanoscale field, presenting tantalizing prospects of revolutionizing medicine and the computer industry. Since their discovery in 1985, engineers and scientists have been exploring the properties of these molecules for a wide range of applications and innovations. But could these microscopic spheres represent a potential environmental hazard?
A new study published in December 2005 in Biophysical Journal raises
If humans continue to use fossil fuels in a business as usual manner for the next several centuries, the polar ice caps will be depleted, ocean sea levels will rise by seven meters and median air temperatures will soar 14.5 degrees warmer than current day.
These are the stunning results of climate and carbon cycle model simulations conducted by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. By using a coupled climate and carbon cycle model to look at global climate and carbon
More than half of the largest galaxies in the nearby universe have collided and merged with another galaxy in the past two billion years, according to a Yale astronomer in a study using hundreds of images from two of the deepest sky surveys ever conducted.
The idea of large galaxies being assembled primarily by mergers rather than evolving by themselves in isolation has grown to dominate cosmological thinking. However, a troubling inconsistency within this general theory has
Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers say some breast cancer cells once fueled by estrogen can be killed by the same hormone. This raises the possibility that estrogen therapy after estrogen deprivation may overcome the cells’ eventual resistance to hormone therapy. The finding by V. Craig Jordan, Ph.D., D. Sc., and his colleagues at Fox Chase is published in the December 7 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Many breast cancer cells (called estrogen receptor–p
Scientists using satellite data have now created the most detailed maps ever produced of the vast snow-covered Antarctic continent. The maps reveal unprecedented views of surface features that provide clues to how and why the continent’s massive ice sheets and glaciers are changing.
Researchers can now decipher the intricate history of ice movements in the just-released “Mosaic of Antarctica,” which uses images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer onboard NASA’s Te
Scientists studying the effects of carbon on climate warming are very likely underestimating, by a vast amount, how much soil carbon is available in the high Arctic to be released into the atmosphere, new University of Washington research shows.
A three-year study of soils in northwest Greenland found that a key previous study greatly underestimated the organic carbon stored in the soil. That’s because the earlier work generally looked only at the top 10 inches of soil, sa
University of Chicago physicists have created a novel state of matter using nothing more than a container of loosely packed sand and a falling marble. They have found that the impacting marble produces a jet of sand grains that briefly behaves like a special type of dense fluid.
“We’re discovering a new type of fluid state that seems to exist in this combination of gas–air in this case–and a dense arrangement of particles,” said Heinrich Jaeger, Professor in Physics and Di
Create powerful statistical techniques to detect signals
A Case Western Reserve University research team from physics and statistics has recently created innovative statistical techniques that improve the chances of detecting a signal in large data sets. The new techniques can not only search for the “needle in the haystack” in particle physics, but also have applications in discovering a new galaxy, monitoring transactions for fraud and security risk, identifying the carrier
The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD)-the first underground observatory to provide physical samples and real-time seismological data from deep inside an active fault zone-is yielding surprising new clues about the origin of earthquakes. SAFOD scientists from around the world will discuss these new findings on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.
SAFOD is a major research component of EarthScop
New research published this week (8 December) has identified the fundamental differences between two and four legged animals that explain what limits their top speeds.
The research, published in the journals Nature and Biology Letters and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), shows how a human running into a high-speed corner is forced to slow down and increase the amount of time their foot is in contact with the ground in order to withstand
ESO, the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, announced today that it has signed a contract with the consortium led by Alcatel Alenia Space and composed also of European Industrial Engineering (Italy) and MT Aerospace (Germany), to supply 25 antennas for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) project, along with an option for another seven antennas. The contract, worth 147 million euros, covers the design, manufacture, transport and on-site integration of
CAMBIA & IRRI (The International Rice Research Institute) today announced a major joint venture to advance the BiOS Initiative – a new strategy that will galvanize agricultural research focused on poverty alleviation and hunger reduction. The venture is catalyzed by a 2.55M USD grant to CAMBIA from The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway.
The BiOS Initiative – Biological Innovation for Open Society – is often called Open Source Biotechnology. The BiOS model has resonance with the O
Feedback
