DALLAS (SMU) – New research produced by Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org, suggests that the temperature of the Earth beneath the state of West Virginia is significantly higher than previously estimated and capable of supporting commercial baseload geothermal energy production. Geothermal energy is the use of the Earth's heat to produce heat and electricity. "Geothermal is an extremely reliable form of energy, and it generates power 24/7, which makes it a baseload source like coal or nuclear," said David Blackwell, ...

Under the Water Framework Directive (WFD) (Directive 2000/60/CE), member states are required to achieve Good Water Status for water (continental, estuarine, subterranean and coastal water bodies) in Europe by 2015. Surface water quality is assessed taking into account the ecological and chemical status. The quality of aquatic systems is more accurately assessed using the status of both the water column and the underlying sediment. A recent study by researchers of AZTI-Tecnalia concluded that water bodies risk being misclassified if, on evaluating their chemical status, ...

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new "templated growth" technique for fabricating nanometer-scale graphene devices. The method addresses what had been a significant obstacle to the use of this promising material in future generations of high-performance electronic devices. The technique involves etching patterns into the silicon carbide surfaces on which epitaxial graphene is grown. The patterns serve as templates directing the growth of graphene structures, allowing the formation of nanoribbons of specific widths without the use of ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Wind power is likely to play a large role in the future of sustainable, clean energy, but wide-scale adoption has remained elusive. Now, researchers have found wind farms' effects on local temperatures and proposed strategies for mediating those effects, increasing the potential to expand wind farms to a utility-scale energy resource. Led by University of Illinois professor of atmospheric sciences Somnath Baidya Roy, the research team will publish its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper will appear in the journal's ...

PHILADELPHIA –- Physicists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania have linked the cell structure of the retina to the light and dark contrasts of the natural world, demonstrating the likelihood that the neural pathways humans use for seeing are adapted to best capture the world around us. Researchers found that retinal ganglion cells that see darkness are more numerous and cluster closer together than those that see light, corresponding to the fact that the natural world contains more dark spots than light. Now physicists, and not just pessimists, ...

Phishing scams are making the leap from email to the world's voice systems, and a team of researchers in the Georgia Tech College of Computing has found a way to tag fraudulent calls with a digital "fingerprint" that will help separate legitimate calls from phone scams. Voice phishing (or "vishing") has become much more prevalent with the advent of cellular and voice IP (VoIP) networks, which enable criminals both to route calls through multiple networks to avoid detection and to fake caller ID information. However each network through which a call is routed leaves its ...

DENVER (October 5, 2010) - With over 500 million users worldwide, Facebook has become a global phenomenon, a vast cyber neighborhood where friends meet to share photos, news and gossip. But when those relationships sour, another phenomenon often occurs – unfriending. In what may be the first comprehensive study of its kind, a University of Colorado Denver Business School student has revealed the top reasons for Facebook unfriending, who is unfriended and how they react to being unfriended. "Researchers spend a lot of time examining how people form friendships online ...

Optical gyroscopes, also known as rotation sensors, are widely used as a navigational tool in vehicles from ships to airplanes, measuring the rotation rates of a vehicle on three axes to evaluate its exact position and orientation. Prof. Koby Scheuer of Tel Aviv University's School of Physical Engineering is now scaling down this crucial sensing technology for use in smartphones, medical equipment and more futuristic technologies. Working in collaboration with Israel's Department of Defense, Prof. Scheuer and his team of researchers have developed nano-sized optical gyroscopes ...

ST. LOUIS – Thanks to a discovery by a Saint Louis University researcher, scientists have identified an important microRNA that may allow us to better control cholesterol levels in blood. Led by Ángel Baldán, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Saint Louis University and published in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the study found that the microRNA miR-33, may be key to controlling HDL, or "good" cholesterol levels. In the U.S., heart attack, stroke, and peripheral ...

Causal relationship between rainfall and earthquakes detailed This review article explores natural crustal earthquakes associated with the elements of the hydrologic cycle, which describes the continuous movement of water on, above and below the surface of the Earth, including hurricanes and typhoons. The theory of hydroseismicity, first articulated in 1987, attributes most intraplate and near-intraplate earthquakes, to the dynamics of the hydrological cycle. The Hydroseismicity hypothesis suggests variations in rainfall affect pore-fluid pressure at depth and can ...

WASHINGTON, DC, October 5, 2010 — In a study of earnings inequality among white women, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst find that having children reduces women's earnings, even among workers with comparable qualifications, experience, work hours and jobs. While women at all income levels suffer negative earnings consequences from having children, the lowest-paid women lose the most from motherhood. This earnings penalty ranges from 15 percent per child among low-wage workers to about 4 percent among the highly paid. The findings are published in the ...

JUPITER, FL, October 5, 2010 - Scripps Research Institute scientists have shown for the first time that the neurotransmitter serotonin uses a specialized signaling pathway to mediate biological functions that are distinct from the signaling pathways used by hallucinogenic substances. The new findings could have a profound effect on the development of new therapies for a number of disorders, including schizophrenia and depression. The study was published in the October 6, 2010 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Serotonin has tremendous influence over several brain ...

Chemists at Vanderbilt University have created a new class of liquid crystals with unique electrical properties that could improve the performance of digital displays used on everything from digital watches to flat panel televisions. The achievement, which is the result of more than five years of effort, is described by Professor of Chemistry Piotr Kaszynski and graduate student Bryan Ringstrand in a pair of articles published online on Sept. 24 and Sept. 28 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry. "We have created liquid crystals with an unprecedented electric ...

After a decade of joint work involving 2,700 researchers from 80 countries, the world's scientists – as well as the general public – can now access the Census of Marine Life, which provides the first in-depth look at the more than 120,000 diverse species which inhabit our oceans. The Census of Marine Life initiative, started in 2000, is the result of one of the largest scientific collaborations ever conducted , the result of more than 540 expeditions and 9,000 days at sea, plus more than 2,600 academic papers published during that period. The just-released census paints ...

Measuring a fuel cell's overall performance is relatively easy, but measuring its components individually as they work together is a challenge. That's because one of the best experimental techniques for investigating the details of an electrochemical device while it's operating is x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Traditional XPS works only in a vacuum, while fuel cells need gases under pressure to function. Now a team of scientists from the University of Maryland, the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories, and DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National ...

New neuroscience research by life scientists from UCLA and Australia may potentially help people who have lost their ability to remember due to brain injury or disease. By examining how we learn and store memories, these scientists have shown that the way the brain first captures and encodes a situation or event is quite different from how it processes subsequent similar events. The study is published in the Sept. 29 edition of the online journal PLoS ONE, a publication of the Public Library of Science. Memories are formed in the part of the brain known as the ...

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres (JGR-D), or Water Resources Research (WRR). 1. Antarctic sea ice increase not linked to ozone hole While sea ice extent has declined dramatically in the Arctic in recent years, it has increased slightly in the Antarctic. Some scientists have suggested that increased Antarctic sea ice extent can be explained by the ozone hole over Antarctica. Previous simulations have indicated that the ozone hole induces ...

The oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage—fossilized tracks—is described this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, an animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now Poland. This fossilized trackway places the very closest relatives of dinosaurs on Earth about 250 million years ago—5 to 9 million years earlier than previously described fossilized skeletal material has indicated. The paper also described the 246-million-year-old Sphingopus footprints, the oldest evidence ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – When the economy sours, small firms seeking credit tend to face higher costs of financing, leading them to reinvest their profits before they pay off creditors, according to research published by a University of Illinois finance expert. Small firms, especially those considered financially constrained as a result of their size, low dividend payment or lack of bond rating, often become bogged down in debt because they "get hooked on cheap money, when they can find it" says U. of I. finance professor Murillo Campello. "Since small firms are usually financially ...

AMES, Iowa - Some fisheries in the United States are poised to undergo major changes in the regulations used to protect fish stocks, and Iowa State University researchers have estimated that the new system will be an economic boon to the fishing industry. Quinn Weninger and Rajesh Singh, both associate professors in economics, estimated harvesting costs under the old system and compared that to the newly proposed fishing regulations that lift many restrictions that cause inefficiency while still limiting amounts to be harvested. Their analysis focused on the Pacific Groundfish ...

The pace and extent of Marcellus Shale development across Pennsylvania can be "seen" in animated maps produced by the Penn State Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research. Based on data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the animations (http://www.marcellus.psu.edu/resources/maps.php) show both the number of drilling permits issued for the Marcellus Shale target and the number of wells drilled by year from 2007 through August 2010. Although permits were issued prior to 2007, information on those permits did not include latitude and longitude. "These ...

Sensation seeking—the urge to do exciting things—has been linked to dopamine, a chemical that carries messages in your brain. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists analyzed genes in the dopamine system and found a group of mutations that help predict whether someone is inclined toward sensation seeking. Sensation seeking has been linked to a range of behavior disorders, such as drug addiction. It isn't all bad, though. "Not everyone who's high on sensation seeking becomes a drug addict. They ...

DURHAM, N.H. -- Looking at a hagfish – an eyeless, snot-covered, worm-like scavenger of the deep –the last thing that comes to mind is sex. Yet the reproductive functioning of these ancient vertebrates is such an enduring enigma that a gold medal was once offered to anyone who could elucidate it. Although the prize expired, unclaimed, long ago, University of New Hampshire professor of biochemistry Stacia Sower and colleagues at two Japanese universities have identified the first reproductive hormone of the hagfish – a gonadatropin -- representing a significant step toward ...

Researchers from Northwestern University and NorthShore University HealthSystem (NorthShore) have developed a method to detect early signs of lung cancer by examining cheek cells in humans using pioneering biophotonics technology. "By examining the lining of the cheek with this optical technology, we have the potential to prescreen patients at high risk for lung cancer, such as those who smoke, and identify the individuals who would likely benefit from more invasive and expensive tests versus those who don't need additional tests," said Hemant K. Roy, M.D., director ...

Berkeley – Exposure to dirty air is linked to decreased function of a gene that appears to increase the severity of asthma in children, according to a joint study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. While air pollution is known to be a source of immediate inflammation, this new study provides one of the first pieces of direct evidence that explains how some ambient air pollutants could have long-term effects. The findings, published in the October 2010 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, come from ...