Science Trends

The Ross Polynya where solar heat is absorbed by the ocean. The vertical wall of the ice front stretches a distance of 600 km. An international team of scientists has found part of the world's largest ice shelf is melting 10 times faster than the overall ice shelf average, due to solar heating of the surrounding ocean surface. In a study of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, which covers an area roughly the size of France, the scientists spent several years building up a record of how the north-west sector of this vast ice shelf interacts with the ocean beneath it. Their results, reported in the journal  Nature Geoscience , show that the ice is melting much more rapidly than previously thought due to inflowing warm water. "The stability of ice shelves is generally thought to be related to their exposure to warm deep ocean water, but we've found that solar heated surface water also plays a crucial role in melting ice shelves," said first author Dr Craig St...

This figure shows 3 orientations of Titan's globe. Mapped in blue is the icy corridor. Rain, seas and a surface of eroding organic material can be found both on Earth and on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. However, on Titan it is methane, not water, that fills the lakes with slushy raindrops. While trying to find the source of Titan's methane, University of Arizona researcher Caitlin Griffith and her team discovered something unexoldpected -- a long ice feature that wraps nearly half way around Titan. Griffith, a professor in the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, is the lead author on the paper published today in  Nature Astronomy . On Titan, atmospheric methane molecules are continuously broken apart by sunlight. The resulting atmospheric haze settles to the surface and accumulates as organic sediments, rapidly depleting the atmospheric methane. This organic veneer is made up of the material of past atmospheres. There is no obvious source of methane, ex...

Neither the continents nor the oceans have always looked the way they do now. These 'paleomaps' show how the continents and oceans appeared before (top) and during (bottom) 'the collision that changed the world,' when the landmass that is now the Indian subcontinent rammed northward into Asia, closing the Tethys Sea and building the Himalayas. Global ocean levels were higher then, creating salty shallow seas (pale blue) that covered much of North Africa and parts of each of the continents. A team of Princeton researchers, using samples gathered at the three starred locations, created an unprecedented record of ocean nitrogen and oxygen levels from 70 million years ago through 30 million years ago that shows a major shift in ocean chemistry after the India-Asia collision. Another shift came 35 million years ago, when Antarctica began accumulating ice and global sea levels fell. Credit Credit: Images created by Emma Kast, Princeton University, using paleogeographic...

Amateur astronomer's photograph used in the new research. The photograph was taken on May 8, 2016, in Keller, Wash. The major structures are two bands of upper atmospheric emissions 160 kilometers (100 miles) above the ground, a mauve arc and green picket fence. The black objects at the bottom are trees. The background star constellations include Gemini and Ursa Major. The celestial phenomenon known as STEVE is likely caused by a combination of heating of charged particles in the atmosphere and energetic electrons like those that power the aurora, according to new research. In a new study, scientists found STEVE's source region in space and identified two mechanisms that cause it. Last year, the obscure atmospheric lights became an internet sensation. Typical auroras, the northern and southern lights, are usually seen as swirling green ribbons spreading across the sky. But STEVE is a thin ribbon of pinkish-red or mauve-colored light stretching from east to west, far...

To make the 3D-printable fluidic device, Berkeley Lab researchers designed a specially patterned glass substrate. When two liquids - one containing nanoscale clay particles, another containing polymer particles - are printed onto the substrate, they come together at the interface of the two liquids and within milliseconds form a very thin channel or tube about 1 millimeter in diameter. Researchers at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have 3D-printed an all-liquid device that, with the click of a button, can be repeatedly reconfigured on demand to serve a wide range of applications -- from making battery materials to screening drug candidates. "What we demonstrated is remarkable. Our 3D-printed device can be programmed to carry out multistep, complex chemical reactions on demand," said Brett Helms, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and Molecular Foundry, who led the study. "What's even more am...

A raw diamond from Sierra Leone with sulfur-containing mineral inclusions. The longevity of Earth's continents in the face of destructive tectonic activity is an essential geologic backdrop for the emergence of life on our planet. This stability depends on the underlying mantle attached to the landmasses. New research by a group of geoscientists from Carnegie, the Gemological Institute of America, and the University of Alberta demonstrates that diamonds can be used to reveal how a buoyant section of mantle beneath some of the continents became thick enough to provide long-term stability. "We've found a way to use traces of sulfur from ancient volcanoes that made its way into the mantle and eventually into diamonds to provide evidence for one particular process of continent building," explained Karen Smit of the Gemological Institute of America, lead author on the group's paper, which appears this week in  Science . "Our technique shows that the g...

Gopala Anumanchipalli, PhD, holding an example array of intracranial electrodes of the type used to record brain activity in the current study. Source: University of California - San Francisco Summary: A state-of-the-art brain-machine interface created by neuroscientists can generate natural-sounding synthetic speech by using brain activity to control a virtual vocal tract -- an anatomically detailed computer simulation including the lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. The study was conducted in research participants with intact speech, but the technology could one day restore the voices of people who have lost the ability to speak due to paralysis or neurological damage.

This is a ground-based telescope's view of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The inset image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals one of many star clusters scattered throughout the dwarf galaxy. New measurements from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang, astronomers say. The new measurements, published April 25 in the  Astrophysical Journal Letters , reduce the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and suggest that new physics may be needed to better understand the cosmos. "This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This is not what we expected," says Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Nobel Laureate and the project's lead...

Rice University physicist Christopher Tunnell at the XENON1T experiment in Italy. The collaboration discovered that xenon 124 has the longest half-life ever measured in a material. The element's half-life is many orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe. In terms of longevity, the universe has nothing on xenon 124. An international team of physicists that includes three Rice University researchers -- assistant professor Christopher Tunnell, visiting scientist Junji Naganoma and assistant research professor Petr Chaguine -- have reported the first direct observation of two-neutrino double electron capture for xenon 124, the physical process by which it decays. Their paper appears this week in the journal  Nature . While most xenon isotopes have half-lives of less than 12 days, a few are thought to be exceptionally long-lived, and essentially stable. Xenon 124 is one of those, though researchers have estimated its half-life at 160 trillion ...

Add caption Changes in temperature and precipitation have already impacted the amount of nitrogen introduced into U.S. waterways, according to new research from a team of three Carnegie ecologists published this week in  Environmental Science & Technology . Nitrogen from agriculture and other human activities washes into waterways, which, in excess, creates a dangerous phenomenon called eutrophication. This can lead to toxin-producing algal blooms or low-oxygen dead zones called hypoxia. Over the past several summers, dead zones and algal blooms in lake and coastal regions across the United States have received extensive news coverage. Carnegie's Anna Michalak and her team have spent several years studying the effects of nitrogen runoff and how expected changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change could lead to greater risks to water quality. But their efforts so far have focused on making predictions of the future. Now, with Tristan Ballard, they looked...

The robot is made using kirigami -- a Japanese paper craft that relies on cuts to change the properties of a material. As the robot stretches, the kirigami surface "pops up" into a 3D-textured surface, which grips the ground just like snake skin. Bad news for ophiophobes: Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new and improved snake-inspired soft robot that is faster and more precise than its predecessor. The robot is made using kirigami -- a Japanese paper craft that relies on cuts to change the properties of a material. As the robot stretches, the kirigami surface "pops up" into a 3D-textured surface, which grips the ground just like snake skin. The first-generation robot used a flat kirigami sheet, which transformed uniformly when stretched. The new robot has a programmable shell, meaning the kirigami cuts can pop up as desired, improving the robot's speed and accuracy. ...

Left: Researchers began by measuring responses in the auditory cortex to find a map of how frequency responses were represented in the brain. The warm colors represent regions of the brain that showed the greatest response to low-pitched tones, while blue colors represent regions that responded more to high-pitched tones. Right: When researchers examined the range of frequencies each vertex of the brain was selective to, they found tuning tended to be narrower for blind individuals, which may underlie the enhanced ability of blind individuals to pick out and identify sounds in the environment. Research has shown that people who are born blind or become blind early in life often have a more nuanced sense of hearing, especially when it comes to musical abilities and tracking moving objects in space (imagine crossing a busy road using sound alone). For decades scientists have wondered what changes in the brain might underlie these enhanced auditory abilities. Now, a pair of r...

Theoretically, this experimental device could turn boiling water to ice, without using any energy. On its final flyby of Saturn's largest moon in 2017, NASA's Cassini spacecraft gathered radar data revealing that the small liquid lakes in Titan's northern hemisphere are surprisingly deep, perched atop hills and filled with methane. The new findings, published April 15 in Nature Astronomy, are the first confirmation of just how deep some of Titan's lakes are (more than 300 feet, or 100 meters) and of their composition. They provide new information about the way liquid methane rains on, evaporates from and seeps into Titan -- the only planetary body in our solar system other than Earth known to have stable liquid on its surface. Scientists have known that Titan's hydrologic cycle works similarly to Earth's -- with one major difference. Instead of water evaporating from seas, forming clouds and rain, Titan does it all with methane and ethane. We tend...