News by Subject Earth Science

A new University of Rochester study shows that nitrogen-feeding organisms exist all over the deep ocean, and not just in large oxygen-depleted 'dead zones,' changing the way we think about the delicate nitrogen cycle.

A weather system moving slowly westward through the northwestern Hawaiian Islands has caused destructive flooding and mudslides and NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM satellite analyzed the heavy rainfall.

A common Great Barrier Reef coral species has enough genetic diversity to survive at least 100 years before succumbing to global warming predicts Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues. They report these findings in a new study published April 19, 2018, in PLOS Genetics.

An international research team has proposed a way to increase the efficiency of wireless power transfer over long distances and tested it with numerical simulations and experiments. To achieve this, they beamed power between two antennas, one of which was excited with a back-propagating signal of specific amplitude and phase. The new development will improve wireless power transmission. This study also offers new approaches to wireless communication, where external conditions can change unpredictably.

Surface air temperature (SAT) anomalies have pronounced impacts on agriculture, socioeconomic development, and people's daily lives. A question is whether the Eurasian atmospheric circulation anomalies can persist from winter to the following spring. Using observational data and atmospheric model simulation, scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported that the dominant mode of winter Eurasian 500-hPa geopotential height anomalies could maintain to the following spring.

HE Jinsheng's research team at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, collaborating with scientists from Peking University, established a warming-by-precipitation manipulative experiment at the Haibei National Field Research Station of Alpine Grassland Ecosystem. By combining the field manipulative experiment, 32 years of field monitoring and a meta-analysis from nine sites across the plateau, the impact of climate change on species composition and net primary productivity in Tibetan alpine grasslands was investigated.

On Sunday, April 15, a line of strong storms at one point stretched from the Florida Straits below the Florida Keys all the way up the East Coast and into Ohio. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite analyzed the severe storms as it passed overhead. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA.

Each year, the effects of corroding materials sap more than $1 trillion from the global economy. As certain alloys are exposed to extreme stress and temperatures, an oxide film begins to form, causing the alloys to break down even more quickly. What precisely makes these conditions so conducive for corrosion, however, remains poorly understood, especially in microelectromechanical devices. Chinese researchers have started to chip away at why these materials corrode under mechanical stress.