New research has shown surface ice melt will be the dominant process controlling ice-loss from Greenland. As outlet glaciers retreat inland the other process, iceberg production, remains important but will not grow as rapidly. The Greenland ice sheet is often considered an important potential contributor to future global sea-level rise over the next century or longer. In total, it contains an amount of ice that would lead to a rise of global sea level by more than seven metres, if completely melted. Changes in its total mass are governed by two main processes - fluctuations ...

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other scientific institutions are using social media and crowdsourcing to learn more about earthquakes, according to a new report. These techniques provide inexpensive and rapid data to augment and extend the capabilities provided by traditional monitoring techniques. The new report, Transforming Earthquake Detection and Science Through Citizen Seismology, released today by the Commons Lab at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, outlines these groundbreaking citizen science projects. The report describes ...

Imagine turning a whiteboard, glass window or even a wooden table top into a responsive, touch sensitive surface. A low cost system developed by Nanyang Technological University (NTU), based on the principles of vibration and imaging that is able to track the movements of multiple fingers and of objects, can do just that. Retrofitting the system onto existing flat-panel TVs will transform it into new, touch sensitive display screens, at only a fraction of the cost of new touch-sensitive display screens, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Once hooked up ...

The seeding of marine clouds to cool sea surface temperatures could protect threatened coral reefs from being bleached by warming oceans. Research, published in Atmospheric Science Letters, proposes that a targeted version of the geo-engineering technique could give coral a fifty year 'breathing space' to recover from acidification and warming. "Coral bleaching over the last few decades has been caused by rising sea temperatures and ocean acidification," said Dr Alan Gadian, from Leeds University. "Our research focuses on how Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) could quickly ...

Oxford -- A team of researchers from the University of Rostock in Germany has developed a new way to rapidly produce high strength metallic alloys, at a lower cost using less energy than before. It's expected that this breakthrough will profoundly change how we produce components used in a diverse range of applications; including transport and medical devices. The research, which appears in the latest issue of the open access journal Materials Today, reports on the first Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) system with an integrated gas quenching mechanism, capable of alternating ...

Whether a child is conceived naturally or in a Petri dish in an incubator has no bearing at all on the child's mental health. However, researchers have identified a small but increased risk of developing a mental disorder such as autism, ADHD or behavioural problems in children whose mothers only received medical treatment to stimulate ovulation and egg development before insemination. This is the result of a new research project from Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital, which has compared the risk of mental illness in artificially fertilised and naturally ...

When did people first begin to express their feelings with flowers? It turns out that in prehistoric times, Mount Carmel residents in what today is northern Israel buried their dead on a literal bed of fragrant wild flowers, such as Judean sage, as well as blooming plants of the mint and figwort families. Assuming they had the same positive associations with flowers that we do today, these ancient humans must have sought to ensure for the deceased a pleasant passage from the world of the living. The discovery is the oldest known use of flowers in grave lining. According ...

This news release is available in German. All the objects around us emit thermal radiation. Usually, this radiation can be described very accurately using Planck's law. If, however, the radiating object is smaller than the thermal wavelength, it behaves according to different rules and cannot emit the energy efficiently. This has now been confirmed by a team of researchers at the Vienna University of Technology. These findings are important for heat management of nano-devices and also for the science of aerosols - microparticles suspended in air, which influence the ...

On 8 July 2013 a huge area of the ice shelf broke away from the Pine Island glacier, the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, and is now floating in the Amundsen Sea in the form of a very large iceberg. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute - Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research have been following this natural spectacle via the earth observation satellites TerraSAR-X from the German Space Agency (DLR) and have documented it in many individual images. The data is intended to help solve the physical puzzle of this "calving". Scientists from ...

The most massive and brightest stars in the galaxy form within cool and dark clouds but the process remains not just shrouded in dust, but also in mystery [1]. An international team of astronomers has now used ALMA to perform a microwave prenatal scan to get a clearer look at the formation of one such monster star that is located around 11 000 light-years away, in a cloud known as the Spitzer Dark Cloud (SDC) 335.579-0.292. There are two theories on the formation of the most massive stars. One suggests that the parental dark cloud fragments, creating several small cores ...

Scientists have observed in unprecedented detail the birth of a massive star within a dark cloud core about 10,000 light years from Earth. The team used the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array) telescope in Chile – the most powerful radio telescope in the world – to view the stellar womb which, at 500 times the mass of the Sun and many times more luminous, is the largest ever seen in our galaxy. The researchers say their observations – to be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics – reveal how matter is being dragged into the centre of ...

In Bolivia, in the largest continuous salt desert in the world, researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have found a bacterium that stores large amounts of PHB, a prized polymer. This biodegradable plastic is used by the food and pharmaceutical industries, for example to produce nanospheres to transport antibiotics. In the quest for natural polymers to substitute for petroleum-based plastics, scientists have recently discovered that a microorganism in South America produces poly-beta-hydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable compound of great utility for ...

Philadelphia, PA -- Many people with schizophrenia have marked problems with motivation, failing to initiate and persist in goal-directed behavior. These negative symptoms of schizophrenia can be disabling and prevent individuals from realizing their potential. For many years it was thought this was due to an inability to experience pleasure associated with successful goal attainment. However, recent laboratory studies have shown that hedonic experience is actually intact in people with schizophrenia, calling for new approaches to better understand these motivational ...

Photosynthesis takes place in specialized membrane systems, made up of stacked disks linked together by unstacked planar leaflets. A team of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich has now identified a protein that tucks the membrane in at the edge of each stack. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrograph of a chloroplast in maize (Zea mays) showing thylakoids (green) and assimilation starch granules (grey). (Prepared by freeze fracturing; micrograph is pseudo-colored.) (Source: G. Wanner LMU) By making use of sunlight to generate molecular oxygen and other ...

Working near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar has unearthed the earliest alphabetical written text ever uncovered in the city. The inscription is engraved on a large pithos, a neckless ceramic jar found with six others at the Ophel excavation site. According to Dr. Mazar, the inscription, in the Canaanite language, is the only one of its kind discovered in Jerusalem and an important addition to the city's history. Dated to the tenth century BCE, the artifact predates by two hundred and fifty years the earliest ...

Fears of depleting the Earth's supply of oil are unwarranted, according to new research, which concludes that the demand for oil – as opposed to the supply – will reach its own peak and then decline. "Peak oil" prognosticators have painted pictures of everything from a calm development of alternatives to calamitous shortages, panic and even social collapse as the world reaches its peak of oil production – and then supplies fall. But according to the study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California-Santa Cruz, those scenarios assume that ...

A new species of rare and beautiful plant has been described from the biodiversity rich Peninsular Malaysia. Ridleyandra chuana is endemic to the region and only known from two small montane forest populations. The conservation status of this recently described delicate flower is assessed as Endangered due to its restricted distribution. The new species was described and illustrated in the open access journal PhytoKeys. Ridleyandra chuana is a perennial herb with a woody usually unbranched stem crowned by an asymmetrical rosette of dark green leaves covered in fine hairs. ...

New insights into why obese cigarette smokers experience a high risk of heart disease suggest that cigarette smoke affects the activity of hundreds of key genes that both protect the heart and lungs and expose them to damage. The study, published in ACS' Chemical Research in Toxicology, suggests that the effects may be especially profound in obese nonsmokers who inhale "sidesteam smoke" from cigarettes smoldering nearby. Diana J. Bigelow and colleagues point out that active smoking doubles the risk of heart disease, while second-hand smoke exposure increases this risk ...

Efforts to develop a safer form of acetaminophen — the pain and fever-reducer that is one of the most widely used drugs — have led to discovery of substances that may have less potentially toxic effects on the liver. A report on the research appears in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters. Roman Shchepin and colleagues explain that a link exists between acetaminophen and liver damage. The damage may be severe and can occur with intentional and accidental overdoses, as well as when susceptible individuals take the drug. Indeed, acetaminophen has been implicated in almost 50 ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Major depression is a serious public health problem among older adults in the United States, but tends to affect ethnic groups differently, finds new research led by a Michigan State University scholar. According to a survey of nearly 2,000 people aged 50 and older, whites and blacks of Caribbean descent experience much higher rates of major depression than African-Americans. Amanda Toler Woodward, lead investigator on the study and MSU associate professor of social work, said the findings, taken as a whole, suggest major depression among older ...

The masses of plastic debris that float over large areas of the world's oceans have become new ecological communities that scientists have named the "Plastisphere." Their report in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology suggests that these novel habitats in the North Atlantic Ocean may harbor potential disease-causing microbes. Erik Zettler of the Sea Education Association, Tracy Mincer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Marine Biological Laboratory explain that plastic has become the No. 1 form of ocean debris, causing ...

Scientists are making strides toward unraveling the surprisingly complex chemistry underpinning that axiom of infant feeding "breast is best," according to an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Jyllian Kemsley, C&EN senior editor, points out that their findings reveal many intriguing and sometimes counterintuitive ways in which sugars, proteins and fat in milk interact with microbes in infants' intestines to nourish babies and protect their ...

Reston, Va. (July 10, 2013) – A new treatment option for patients with relapsing follicular, mantle cell and other indolent B-cell lymphomas has been determined safe and feasible by researchers exploring the potential of a low energy beta-emitter radiopharmaceutical. According to data published in the July issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, the use of 177Lu-DOTA-rituximab as a radioimmunotherapy results in a high rate of tumor response while using less radiation than current therapies. "Twelve years ago, when we started the study, it seemed that radioimmunotherapy ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Researchers have developed a concept to potentially improve delivery of drugs for cancer treatment using nanoparticles that concentrate and expand in the presence of higher acidity found in tumor cells. The concept involves using nanoparticles made of "weak polybases," compounds that expand when transported into environments mimicking tumor cells, which have a higher acidity than surrounding tissues. The researchers used sophisticated modeling to show how the particles would accumulate in regions of higher acidity and remain there long enough to ...

July 10, 2013 - If you see your partner flirt with someone else, you may feel hurt, angry, and jealous. The last thing you might expect is to start thinking of yourself more like your rival. New research suggests just that: that jealousy can prompt people to change how they view themselves relative to competitors for their partners' attention. Previous research has shown that individuals often will change their self-views to be more similar to someone to whom they want to get closer, such as a romantic partner. "However, a rival isn't someone that individuals should ...