science wire

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Otherwise, we'll assume you're OK to continue. Gas can be a bridge to a low carbon future, new research says Gas could play an important role as a 'bridging fuel' to a low carbon economy, according to new research co-authored by Durham University.

Leading energy engineers are suggesting that UK regulations on the surface vibrations caused by shale gas fracking are unnecessarily restrictive.

A "once-in-a-lifetime" chance to watch a comet flying close to Mars gave a unique insight into the effect of such a near miss on a planet's atmosphere, according to a University of Leeds academic. Professor John Plane, a member of the Atmospheric and Planetary Chemistry group in the University's Faculty of Mathematics and Physical Sciences , collaborated in the analysis and interpretation of observations made with NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft of Comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring’s flyby on October 19.

A newly published examination of reasons for female academics' ongoing underrepresentation in math-intensive fields analyzes a very long list of purported culprits - before coming to a surprising conclusion.

Press release issued: 3 November 2014 A rare dinosaur fossil has been restored by an international team of scientists, led by Dr Stephan Lautenschlager from the University of Bristol, using high-resolution X-ray computed tomography (CT scanning) and digital visualisation techniques.

PA 281/14 New technology developed by researchers at The University of Nottingham could offer an early warning system to signpost any potential risks to land stability associated with fracking.

AUSTIN, Texas - A paper by Ian Dalziel of The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences , published in the November issue of Geology , a journal of the Geological Society of Ameri

Title Egmont National Park, New Zealand Released 31/10/2014 10:00 am Copyright KARI/ESA Description Egmont National Park on New Zealand's North Island is pictured in this satellite image.

29 October 2014 Books by Bristol historians Professor Tim Cole and Dr Joanna Beata Michlic will be the two featured books under discussion at the biannual Lessons and Legacies conference - the most i

Title Chaos in Atlantis basin Released 27/10/2014 12:30 pm Copyright ESA/DLR/FU Berlin Description Mars is peppered with craters.

Title Mumbai, India Released 24/10/2014 10:00 am Copyright JAXA/ESA Description The western Indian city of Mumbai is pictured in this image from Japan's ALOS satellite.

Press release issued: 23 October 2014 How ferns adapted to the extreme environmental conditions found in the high Andean mountains of South America is the focus of new research by the Universities of Bristol and Sheffield, published today in PLOS ONE. Ferns are believed to be 'old' plant species - some of them lived alongside the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago.

Researchers resolve the Karakoram glacier anomaly, a cold case of climate science Posted October 22, 2014; 11:30 a.m. by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications Researchers from Princeton University and other institutions may have hit upon an answer to a climate-change puzzle that has eluded scientists for years, and that could help understand the future availability of water for hundreds of millions of people.

Scientists are using volcanic gases to understand how volcanoes work, and as the basis of a hazard-warning forecast system.

The boom in oil and gas produced through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is seen as a boon for meeting U.S. energy needs. But one byproduct of the process is millions of gallons of water that's much saltier than seawater, after leaching salts from rocks deep below the surface. Now researchers at MIT and in Saudi Arabia say they have found an economical solution for removing the salt from this water.

17 October 2014 Europe's Mars orbiter and its scientific instruments will have a frontrow seat on Sunday when Comet Siding Spring grazes the Red Planet, skimming past at a little more than a third of the Moon's distance from Earth.

Caltech oceanographer Andrew Thompson, who uses autonomous underwater instruments and numerical models to study ocean currents and eddies and their impact on Earth's ecology and climate, has been awarded a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Twenty-five years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, a Stanford team develops inexpensive design modifications that could be incorporated into new homes to reduce damage in an earthquake.

Scientists have found evidence for a huge mountain range that sustained an explosion of life on Earth 600 million years ago. The mountain range was similar in scale to the Himalayas and spanned at least 2,500 kilometres of modern west Africa and northeast Brazil, which at that time were part of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Press release issued: 16 October 2014 The likelihood and potential impacts of volcanic ash on nuclear generating sites in the UK will be investigated by researchers from the University of Bristol in

ANN ARBOR-Lake Erie has become increasingly susceptible to large blooms of toxin-producing cyanobacteria since 2002, potentially complicating efforts to rein in the problem in the wake of this year's Toledo drinking water crisis, according to a new study led by University of Michigan researchers.

Collapsible wings may be a bird's answer to turbulence according to an Oxford University study in which an eagle carried its own 'black box' flight recorder on its back. Researchers set out to examine how soaring birds such as eagles, vultures, and kites, are able to fly in 'gusty' turbulent flight conditions that would keep a light aircraft grounded.

Imagine the world waking up one morning to discover that all compasses pointed south instead of north. It's not as bizarre as it sounds. Earth's magnetic field has flipped - though not overnight - many times throughout the planet's history. Its dipole magnetic field, like that of a bar magnet, remains about the same intensity for thousands to millions of years, but for incompletely known reasons it occasionally weakens and, presumably over a few thousand years, reverses direction.

Methane-breathing microbes that inhabit rocky mounds on the seafloor could be preventing large volumes of the potent greenhouse gas from entering the oceans and reaching the atmosphere, according to a new study by Caltech researchers. The rock-dwelling microbes, which are detailed in the Oct. 14 , represent a previously unrecognized biological sink for methane and as a result could reshape scientists' understanding of where this greenhouse gas is being consumed in subseafloor habitats, says Professor of Geobiology Victoria Orphan , who led the study.

The ESWN Leadership Board includes (front row) Carmen Rodriguez, Allison Steiner, Becca Barnes, Emily Fischer, Tracey Holloway, (back row) Meredith Hastings, Mirjam Glessmer, Erika Marín-Spiotta, Agatha de Boer, Christine Wiedinmyer, Manda Adams.

Press release issued: 8 October 2014 How the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth fed, and how this allowed them to live alongside one another in prehistoric ecosystems is the subject of new research from the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum, London. The sauropods - large, long-necked plant-eating dinosaurs such as Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus - dominated the land between 210 and 65 million years ago.

Metabolic networks are mathematical models of every possible sequence of chemical reactions available to an organ or organism, and they're used to design microbes for manufacturing processes or to study disease.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. On Oct. 2, a group of Penn State faculty gathered with policymakers and journalists in a workshop on science communication skills.

Penn State researchers Douglas Martins (left) and Raymond Najjar (4th from left) look on as ship's crew retrieve a drifter using a grapple. Scientists have a good understanding of how air pollution impacts human health and the terrestrial biosphere, but what impact does air pollution have on oceans? To help answer this question, this past August, researchers from Penn State's department of meteorology embarked on a three-week, NSF-funded field project to catch and analyze rainwater at sea.

A team of researchers from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences have recently returned from Iceland where, thanks to a bit of luck, they have gathered the most extensive dataset ever from a volcan

Stephen Hicks, a PhD student in the School of Environmental Sciences , is part of a scientific team currently on a three-week research cruise in the Pacific Ocean to understand earthquake hazard along the western coast of the United States.

3 October 2014 ESA's ice mission has been used to create a new gravity map, exposing thousands of previously unchartered 'seamounts', ridges and deep ocean structures. This vivid new picture of the least-explored part of the ocean offers fresh clues about how continents form and breakup. Carrying a radar altimeter, CryoSat's main role is to provide detailed measurements of the height of the world's ice.

Research shows that the behaviour of business leaders could be directly linked to their experiences in childhood.

Public phase involves Bee/Pollinator Center, Chinese Garden Walk, Snyder Building Preservation & more The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum Foundation has announced the beginning of the public phase

1 October 2014 Four possible landing sites are being considered for the ExoMars mission in 2018. Its rover will search for evidence of martian life, past or present.

AUSTIN, Texas - A team le d by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics has for the first time directly observed multiple parts of Greenland's subglacial plumbing system and how that system evolves each summer to slow down the ice sheet's movement toward the sea. These new observations could be important in accurately modeling Greenland's future response to climate change.

New data obtained by NASA's GRAIL mission reveals that the Procellarum region on the near side of the moon - a giant basin often referred to as the "man in the moon" - likely arose not from a massive asteroid strike, but from a large plume of magma deep within the moon's interior.

"Cornell has been fundamentally shaped by its founders' lasting vision of a university dedicated to inclusion, to egalitarianism and public engagement.

Shasta Lake in Northern California on August 25th, 2014, at Bridge Bay Resort and Marina. The lake's water level is so low that all but this last boat launch ramp are no longer useable. (Photo: Kelly M. Grow) The extreme atmospheric conditions associated with California's crippling drought are far more likely to occur under today's global warming conditions than in the climate that existed before humans emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases.

Rain or shine, it's always monsoon season for William Boos. From his meteorological lair on Science Hill, Boos calmly monitors fluid dynamics and atmospheric depressions thousands of miles away.

Shasta Lake in Northern California on August 25th, 2014, at Bridge Bay Resort and Marina. The lake's water level is so low that all but this last boat launch ramp are no longer useable. (Photo: Kelly M. Grow) The extreme atmospheric conditions associated with California's crippling drought are far more likely to occur under today's global warming conditions than in the climate that existed before humans emitted large amounts of greenhouse gases.

Following wildfires in 2011, a UW-Madison research team studied lodgepole pine trees in the Northern Rocky Mountains to examine whether earlier outbreaks of mountain pine beetles changed the ecological impact of the wildfires.

Press release issued: 26 September 2014 A team of scientists and engineers sampling greenhouse gases in the remote South Atlantic have pushed the boundaries of what's possible with lightweight fully autonomous UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) by flying octocopters at altitudes of up to 9,000ft.

Title Attica peninsula, Greece Released 26/09/2014 11:21 am Copyright ESA Description Greece's Attica peninsula, with the capital and largest city of Athens appearing bright white near the centre, is captured in this radar image from Sentinel-1A on 22 April.

Scientists have produced the first detailed record of sea levels over the past 500,000 years and spanning five ice ages, using microfossils from sediments in the Red Sea. The team determined accurate dates for the sea levels by linking wind-blown dust in the sediments to a climate record from stalagmites from caves in China.

25 September 2014 Three Bristol academics are serving on the editorial boards of a new, groundbreaking journal published by the Royal Society.

Scientists have uncovered the natural fertiliser contained within Saharan dust that plays an important role in the health of the Amazon rainforest when it is blown across the Atlantic: fish bone. The research, involving researchers from the University of Leeds, Birkbeck, University of London, and the Diamond Light Source, is published on 25 September 2014 in the print edition of the journal Chemical Geology .

Title IXV drop-test model being moved Released 24/09/2014 1:04 pm Copyright ESA-A. Le Floc'h Description This drop-test model of ESA's Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) spaceplane will be one of the star attractions of the Sunday, 5 October ESTEC Open Day.