science wire

The news is out that there's a mountain lion living in Griffith Park these days, but what you may not know is why he branched out from his home in the west Santa Monica Mountains. Competition there is fierce — and, according to the family tree traced out by a UCLA lab, it's also a bit of a soap opera up there.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Analysis of small, repeating earthquakes in an Antarctic ice sheet may not only lead to an understanding of glacial movement, but may also shed light on stick slip earthquakes like those on the San Andreas fault or in Haiti, according to Penn State geoscientists. "No one has ever seen anything with such regularity," said Lucas K. Zoet, recent Penn State Ph.

The laser instrument has fired nearly 500 shots so far that have produced strong, clear data about the composition of the Martian surface. Curiosity beams back strong, clear data from 'scour' area on Martian surface LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO, August 23, 2012—Members of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover ChemCam team, including Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, squeezed in a little extra target practice after zapping the first fist-sized rock that was placed in the laser's crosshairs last weekend.

High levels of background noise, mainly due to ships, have reduced the ability of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales to communicate with each other at the mouth of the Massachusetts Bay by about two-thirds, according to a new study published in the August issue of the journal Conservation Biology (26:4).

Ancient pollen and charcoal preserved in deeply buried sediments in Egypt's Nile Delta document the region's ancient droughts and fires, including a huge drought 4,200 years ago associated with the demise of Egypt's Old Kingdom, the era known as the pyramid-building time.

Landslides kill ten times more people across the world than was previously thought, according to research by Durham University, UK.

Mark di Suvero's large-scale sculpture settles in on the School of Medicine Dean's Lawn. Moving art can get complicated very quickly.

AUSTIN, Texas — The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has introduced an online database for its entire Kraus map collection. The 36-map collection, acquired in 1969 by Harry Ransom from the New York antiquarian dealer Hans P. Kraus, features a wide range of individual maps of Europe and America, atlases, a rare set of large terrestrial and celestial globes (ca. 1688) produced by the Italian master Vincenzo Coronelli and a group of manuscript letters by Abraham Ortelius.

Maps showing competing countries from across the globe swelling in relation to their Olympic medal hauls have been created by a researcher from the University of Sheffield.

A national network of earthquake detectors is connecting Canberra kids with real science, writes TEGAN DOLSTRA.

A review prepared by the University of Melbourne looks at new methods of water conservation and the need to transform policies and attitudes. The paper describes three emerging methods of addressing shortages: substituting high-quality water with lower-quality water where appropriate, creating drinking water from wastewater and reducing leaks and the volume needed for basic services.

For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth.

The UK's appalling summer of weather could have had an unexpected benefit for Olympic athletes and spectators - it could have delivered one of the least polluted Games in history, according to University of Manchester researchers.

A high-tech computer model called HIGRAD/FIRETEC provides insights that are essential for front-line fire fighters.

Members of the team got a digital thumbs up about the operational readiness of their instrument just hours after the rover landed on Martian soil.

AUSTIN, Texas — Most earthquakes in the Barnett Shale region of North Texas occur within a few miles of one or more injection wells used to dispose of wastes associated with petroleum production such as hydraulic fracturing fluids, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

The ChemCam laser characterization instrument was developed at LANL and the French space institute, IRAP. LANL ChemCam to be tested soon and will begin probing Mars mysteries LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, August 6, 2012—Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are elated by Sunday's successful landing of NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars, and are ready to begin a nearly two-year-long mission that will use a rock-zapping laser device mounted on the mast of the SUV-sized rover to help unravel mysteries of the Red Planet.

Much like a treasure map branded with an 'X' to mark the site of buried bounty, NASA's rover Curiosity will be targeting its very own 'X' inside Gale Crater, to seek out the signs of past water - and maybe even life - on the Red Planet.

The team investigated the Parana River Professor Janet Hooke from the University's Earth Surface Dynamics group in the School of Environmental Sciences is photographed here in Brazil conducting field work on river dynamics as part of a visit to the State University of Sao Paulo (UNESP).

Now's the time to prepare for the heat waves, heavy rains and droughts that climate change will bring, says Stanford's Chris Field, a noted climate researcher.

  A snapshot of the reversal of a numerical dynamo model similar to that used in this study Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that variations in the long-term reversal rate of

Rock weathering by fungi in partnership with tree roots began hundreds of millions of years earlier than first thought, scientists at the University of Sheffield have found. Over time the subsequent evolution of both the root associating fungi and their tree partners accelerated the processes which drive soil development and calcium release from continental rocks to the oceans, where it contributes to the regulation of Earth's carbon dioxide levels over timescales of millions of years.

Researchers at Yale have identified an ancient slithering creature from the time of T. rex as the most primitive known snake, a finding with implications for the debate over snake origins.

Sussex appoints new PVC for Research The University has appointed a new Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) to replace Professor Bob Allison, who is leaving Sussex this summer to become Vice-Chancellor at Loughborough University.

Sunshine equals ice cream. Food historians have long portrayed ice cream as a luxury product confined to the elite until freezing technology brought it to the masses.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Researchers could have a new method to rebuild wetlands of the Louisiana delta, thanks to a chance finding while monitoring severe flooding of the Mississippi River. A team of civil engineers and geologists from the University of Illinois, in collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, published their findings Geoscience.

The former Head of the Mining and Minerals Engineering Section in the School of Engineering has completed a publication on the restoration of the old Roman gold mine, on the Dolaucothi Estate at Pumsaint, Carmarthenshire in South Wales.

(Note: This post was revised on July 18, 2012) The slide show below features some of the ongoing research by scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of the Earth Institute, whose work is key to understanding past changes in the oceans and what is going on today.

Findings suggest the surface of Saturn's largest moon may have undergone a recent transformation. For many years, Titan's thick, methane- and nitrogen-rich atmosphere kept astronomers from seeing what lies beneath. Saturn's largest moon appeared through telescopes as a hazy orange orb, in contrast to other heavily cratered moons in the solar system.

A stunning image showing Aurora Australis - the Southern Lights - glowing over Concordia station in the Antarctic, one of the remotest places on Earth, on 18 July 2012.

This is an edited version of a speech Ken Henry AC gave to the Crawford School of Public Policy on 18 July as part of the week-long policy futures and innovation event, Policy public: ideas, insights and initiatives until 2020 .

Sponsored projects awards at leading ocean and earth science institution achieve record due to successful competition for research funds Scripps continues to serve as economic engine for the local re

— Coral Gables — The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in spring 2010 is the largest oil spill in the history of the United States, with more than 200 million gallons of crude oil released at about 1,500 m. depth off the Mississippi Delta in the Gulf of Mexico.

Sea levels may rise much higher than previously thought, according to scientists from The Australian National University, who have used fossil corals to understand how warmer temperatures in the past promoted dramatic melting of polar ice sheets. Andrea Dutton, formerly of the Research School of Earth Sciences (RSES) in the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, teamed up with Professor Kurt Lambeck of the RSES to analyse fossil corals around the world from the last interglacial period, 125,000 years ago.

Plymouth University has been working with staff at the Environment Agency to support professional development in the key area of coastal science.

The cause of rapid sea level rise in the past has been found by scientists at the University of Bristol using climate and ice sheet models. The process, named 'saddle-collapse', was found to be the cause of two rapid sea level rise events: the Meltwater pulse 1a (MWP1a) around 14,600 years ago and the '8,200 year' event.

Natural gas is much-needed tool in battle to slow global warming, researcher says Natural gas as an energy source is a smart move in the battle against global climate change and a good transition step on the road toward low-carbon energy from wind, solar and nuclear power.

— Coral Gables — Understanding dynamics of mesoscale eddies (motions on the scales of tens to a few hundreds of kilometers) remains one of the fundamental challenges in physical oceanography. While the importance of these eddies in ocean dynamics is now widely accepted, they are still not fully captured by the majority of climate models, and scientists are still struggling to understand how these eddies form and evolve over time.

Europe clears the air Satellite measurements show that nitrogen dioxide in the lower atmosphere over parts of Europe and the US has fallen over the past decade. More than 15 years of atmospheric observations have revealed trends in air quality. As the world's population increases, economies in many countries are also growing and populations are concentrating in large cities.

Scientists are taking a trip back to the Byzantine Empire to examine whether future climate change could increase the chances of a pandemic such as the bubonic plague. A team of researchers will examine mud samples from Lake Nar in central Turkey, which was the epicentre of the Plague of Justinian that wiped out up to a quarter of the population of the Eastern Mediterranean region between AD541 and AD750.

Public awareness of fracking - the method of extracting shale gas — is low, despite high levels of coverage of the controversial process in the media, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Bristol are part of a new five-year interdisciplinary study exploring better ways to forecast and cope with future volcanic eruptions.

Professor Iain Stewart is set to star in a special four-day BBC programme aiming to provide a unique insight into the life, impact and real-time activity of volcanoes.

With the unpredictable and unseasonable weather once again dominating the news agenda, The University of Manchester Atmospheric Science Group are available for expert comment on a range of weather-related stories.