news 2010

The onset of summer in England has been advancing since the mid 1950s, research from a pair of University of Sheffield geographers has shown. The investigations, conducted by Amy Kirbyshire, a former undergraduate of the University, and Professor Grant Bigg, Head of the Department of Geography at the University, examined records of the first blooming date of early summer flowering plants (phenology) and the timing of first occurrences of warm `summer´ temperatures - events linked with the onset of summer.

An international group of scientists will gather at the University of Cambridge on Friday 7 May 2010 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer, one of the most dramatic scientific findings of modern times. The event will be web cast live. The seminal paper, published in the journal Nature, alerted the world to a major environmental threat and paved the way for concerted international action to address the problem.

PASADENA, Calif.—On August 15, 2007, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck in Central Peru, killing more than 500 people—primarily in the town of Pisco, which was heavily damaged by the temblor—and triggering a tsunami that flooded Pisco's shore and parts of Lima's Costa Verde highway.

BERKELEY — A Haitian orchid is enjoying celebrity status at the UC Botanical Garden, after scientists discovered that the long-time Garden resident is a distinct new species. A low-growing plant with showy red-orange flowers, the plant has been in the Garden collection since the 1990s, bearing the name Maxillaria croceorubens .

Cambridge, MA - NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun's dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth. Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots.

The University has several groups that are among the leaders in the field of climate change research. In the run-up to the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a flurry of articles was published in prestigious journals, six of which included researchers from these groups. A study in Science (12 November) reported that satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate.

NASA's Terra satellite flew directly over Iceland on April 19, 2010, allowing its Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument to capture a series of images of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano and its erupting ash plume. The left panel of this image shows a view from MISR's nadir (vertical-viewing) camera, while the right panel contains a computer-analyzed map of plume heights, which have been corrected to compensate for the effects of wind.

McGill researchers uncover first evidence that warm and moderate climate allowed dinosaurs to expand into one massive homogenous community across North America Researchers at McGill University are unlocking the mysteries of the little-known habits of dinosaurs in discovering that the entire western interior of North America was likely once populated by a single community of dinosaurs.

Scientists studying fossils and minerals from Arctic Svalbard, in Norway, have discovered evidence that the ‘greenhouse’ climate of the Cretaceous period was punctuated by a sudden drop in global temperatures. The drop is estimated to have occurred some 137 million years ago during a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and would have seen the islands fall from an average of 13 degrees centigrade (ocean temperature) to as low as four degrees.

Since the earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the "Höhere Geodäsie" [Advanced Geodesy] research group at the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) has been helping measure the earth on a global scale. First results indicate that the rotational speed of the earth has become marginally slower and days have become longer by 0.3 microseconds.

Based on topographic data obtained by NASA's Magellan spacecraft, this figure shows the volcanic peak Idunn Mons in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The colored overlay shows the heat patterns derived from surface brightness data collected by VIRTIS aboard the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft.

The observations reveal that volcanoes on Venus appeared to erupt between a few hundred years to 2.5 million years ago. This suggests the planet may still be geologically active, making Venus one of the few worlds in our solar system that has been volcanically active within the last 3 million years.

Researchers have long wondered why water on Earth was not frozen during the early days of the planet, when the sun emanated only 70 to 75 percent as much energy as it does today. Some theorize that high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the same mechanism cited in global warming today, were key.

The main cause of a rapid global cooling period, known as the Big Freeze or Younger Dryas - which occurred nearly 13,000 years ago - has been identified thanks to the help of an academic at the University of Sheffield. A new paper, which is published in Nature today (1 April 2010), has identified a mega-flood path across North America which channelled melt-water from a giant ice sheet into the oceans and triggering the Younger Dryas cold snap.

UCL's Professor John Butterworth, who led the UK development of one of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors, explains the significance of the record-breaking particle collisions achieved today. Protons collided at seven trillion volts ? the highest energies ever achieved by a man-made particle accelerator ? at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), which houses the LHC, near Geneva.

Scientists from Cambridge, London and Melbourne have found the first ever evidence that tyrannosaur dinosaurs existed in the southern continents. They identified a hip bone found at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia as belonging to an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex. The find sheds new light on the evolutionary history of this group of dinosaurs.

As the world media continues to cover the aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, the country's own journalists are confronting the challenges of reporting on a disaster that has affected them both as survivors as well as witnesses. For one week in March, The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma , based at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism , and its partner, CECOSIDA, conducted workshops with local journalists in Haiti to foster awareness about the impacts of trauma on them, their families and their audiences.

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, addressing the physical needs of survivors—providing emergency medical care, food and water—can make the difference between life and death. But in the weeks, months and sometimes years that follow, the mental health effects may linger well after physical wounds have healed.

Before the Jan. 12 earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince, the last great quake to strike Haiti was more than 150 years ago. Assessing historical seismic activity can be critical to understanding the future threat that earthquakes pose to Haiti's long-term stability and recovery. On Feb. 24, scientists from several research centers set sail to conduct a 20-day research cruise off of Haiti to examine the surrounding ocean floor for evidence of the recent earthquakes.

Turbines installed in water could cause drop in temperature; land turbines could cause rise MIT analysis suggests wind turbines could cause temperatures to rise and fall New microscopy technique offers close-up, real-time view of cellular phenomena CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Although wind power has emerged as a viable renewable energy source in recent years ? one that proponents say could lessen the threat of global warming ? a new MIT analysis may serve to temper enthusiasm about wind power, at least at very large scales.