news 2010

By Nick Bascom and Melissa Beattie-Moss Research/Penn State In the 1997 movie "Contact" (based on the novel by Carl Sagan), actress Jodie Foster plays an astrophysicist devoted to SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Despite doubting colleagues, she vigilantly monitors signals from radio telescopes aimed at thousands of nearby sun-like stars, hoping to receive a message from alien life forms.

X-ray diffraction image of the post-perovskite phase of the mineral magnesium silicate glass (MgSiO3), produced in a diamond-anvil cell under 1.85 million times atmospheric pressure and heated to 3500 Kelvin. (Image: Advanced Light Source/LBNL) BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University scientists have recreated the tremendous pressures and high temperatures deep in the Earth to resolve a long-standing puzzle: why some seismic waves travel faster than others through the boundary between the solid mantle and fluid outer core.

PASADENA, Calif. Snowmelt in the Colorado River basin is occurring earlier, reducing runoff and the amount of crucial water available downstream. A new study shows this is due to increased dust caused by human activities in the region during the past 150 years. The study, led by a NASA scientist and funded by the agency and the National Science Foundation, showed peak spring runoff now comes three weeks earlier than before the region was settled and soils were disturbed.

WASHINGTON - Snow melt in the Colorado River basin is occurring earlier, reducing runoff and the amount of crucial water available downstream. A new study shows this is due to increased dust caused by human activities in the region during the past 150 years. The study, led by a NASA scientist and funded by the agency and the National Science Foundation (NSF), showed peak spring runoff now comes three weeks earlier than before the region was settled and soils were disturbed.

Editor's note: The following is a press release from Brown University PROVIDENCE, R.I. The Moon looks like a pockmarked golf ball. The dimples and divots on its surface are testament that our satellite has withstood a barrage of impacts from comets, asteroids and other space matter throughout much of its history.

Data from the Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft have been used in a groundbreaking new university study that examines the concentration, distribution and composition of aerosol pollution over the Indian subcontinent. The study documents the region's very high levels of natural and human-produced pollutants, and uncovered surprising seasonal shifts in the source of the pollution.

NASA and European researchers have conducted a novel study to simultaneously measure, for the first time, trends in how water is transported across Earth's surface and how the solid Earth responds to the retreat of glaciers following the last major Ice Age, including the shifting of Earth's center of mass.

Plate tectonics may not have operated on a younger and hotter Earth according to new research from the University of Bristol carried out on preserved remnants of ancient continental crust in the Hudson Bay region of Canada. The processes that formed and shaped the early Earth's crust are still poorly understood, and the onset of plate tectonics has been estimated as being as early as the Hadean (4.6-3.8 billion years ago) or as late as the Neoproterozoic (1,000-542 million years ago).

PASADENA, Calif. Data from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest liquid water has interacted with the Martian surface throughout the planet's history and into modern times. The research also provides new evidence that volcanic activity has persisted on the Red Planet into geologically recent times, several million years ago.

HOUSTON - Data from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest liquid water has interacted with the Martian surface throughout the planet's history and into modern times. The research also provides new evidence that volcanic activity has persisted on the Red Planet into geologically recent times, several million years ago.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Armed with a decade's worth of satellite data, University of Illinois atmospheric scientists have documented some surprising trends in aerosol pollution concentration, distribution and composition over the Indian subcontinent. In addition to environmental impact, aerosol pollution, or tiny particles suspended in the air, can be detrimental to human health by causing a range of respiratory problems.

Palaeontologists are forever claiming that their latest fossil discovery will 'rewrite evolutionary history'. Is this just boasting or is our 'knowledge' of evolution so feeble that it changes every time we find a new fossil? A team of researchers at the University of Bristol decided to find out, with investigations of dinosaur and human evolution.

A diagram showing the three layers beneath North America. The top layer, the ancient craton, is chemically distinct from younger lithosphere below (the thermal root), which is separated from the asthenosphere by a boundary layer (LAB). (Barbara Romanowicz, UC Berkeley) BERKELEY — The North American continent is not one thick, rigid slab, but a layer cake of ancient, 3 billion-year-old rock on top of much newer material probably less than 1 billion years old, according to a new study by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley.

WASHINGTON - Global plant productivity that once was on the rise with warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline because of regional drought according to a new study of NASA satellite data. Plant productivity is a measure of the rate of the photosynthesis process that green plants use to convert solar energy, carbon dioxide and water to sugar, oxygen and eventually plant tissue.

In findings that push back the clock on the scientific world's thinking about when animal life appeared on Earth, Princeton scientists may have discovered the oldest fossils of animal bodies, suggesting that primitive sponge-like creatures were living in ocean reefs about 650 million years ago. The shelly fossils, found beneath a 635 million-year-old glacial deposit in South Australia, represent the earliest evidence of animal body forms in the current fossil record by at least 70 million years.

Remains of giant horned turtles found at an even older human cemetery in Vanuatu have revealed that the first settlers shared a Pacific island with the turtles for at least two centuries. Researchers have also discovered that subsequent settlers killed, butchered and ate the turtles and dumped their bones on top of their predecessors' graves, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

Washington, D.C. Scientists have discovered a new window into the Earth's violent past. Geochemical evidence from volcanic rocks collected on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic suggests that beneath it lies a region of the Earth's mantle that has largely escaped the billions of years of melting and geological churning that has affected the rest of the planet.

Archaeologists working on Stone Age remains at a site in North Yorkshire say it contains Britain's earliest surviving house. team from the Universities of Manchester and York reveal today that the home dates to at least 8,500 BC - when Britain was part of continental Europe. The research has been made possible by a grant from the Natural Environment Research Council, early excavation funding from the British Academy, and from English Heritage who are about to schedule the site as a National Monument.

Scientists studying the largest drainage basin in the world have used satellite technology to provide the first detailed measurements of water flow between the Amazon River and its floodplains. Every year, 285 billion metric tons, or 285 cubic kilometres of water by volume, rises and falls in the Amazon floodplain, accounting for just five per cent of the total water flow into the ocean.

New NASA airborne radar images of Southern California near the U.S.-Mexico border show Earth's surface is continuing to deform following the April 4 magnitude, 7.2 temblor and its many aftershocks that have rocked Mexico's state of Baja California and parts of the American Southwest. The data, from NASA's airborne Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), reveal that some faults in the area west of Calexico, Calif., have continued to move at Earth's surface, most likely in the many aftershocks.