science wire

The University of Liverpool is part of a European consortium of child protection detectives and researchers that has been awarded more than £1million to tackle sex offenders who possess indecent images of children from the internet.

19 July 2013 This Envisat radar image features a chain of volcanoes called the Virunga Mountains that stretch across Rwanda's northern border with Uganda and east into the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In an international collaborative project, scientists have recorded the times, places and concentrations of oceanic plankton occurrences worldwide.

Bronze Age settlements and Neolithic pottery are some of the finds made by UCL archaeologists during the construction of major new sea defences inland at Medmerry between Selsey and Bracklesham in West Sussex. Once the fieldwork is complete, the archive of artefacts will be submitted to Chichester Museum.

Research points to large reservoirs of material deep in the mantle that may help to explain Earth's origins. It's widely thought that the Earth arose from violent origins: Some 4.5 billion years ago, a maelstrom of gas and dust circled in a massive disc around the sun, gathering in rocky clumps to form asteroids.

15 July 2013 Glide through part of the largest canyon on Mars, Valles Marineris, in this stunning colour movie from ESA's Mars Express.

Large earthquakes from distant parts of the globe are setting off tremors around waste-fluid injection wells in the central United States, says a new study. Furthermore, such triggering of minor quakes by distant events could be precursors to larger events at sites where pressure from waste injection has pushed faults close to failure, say researchers.

It is not unusual for swarms of small earthquakes to precede a volcanic eruption. They can reach a point of such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor that resembles sound

Stanford geophysicists listened in on the 2009 eruption of the Redoubt Volcano outside Anchorage, Alaska.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (07/12/2013) —The University of Minnesota announced today that it has received a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to further the understanding of Earth-surface environments.

Everyone knows that as we grow older our bones become more fragile. Now a team of U.S. and German scientists led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley has shown that this bone-aging process can be significantly accelerated through deficiency of vitamin D - the sunshine vitamin.

Downturn across five regions points to broad oceanographic shift Recent research documents a dramatic, 40-year drop in a number of key fish species and a change in their community structure, according to a new study led by Eric Miller of MBC Applied Environmental Sciences (Costa Mesa, Calif.) and John McGowan of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Broadcaster and journalist Jonathan Dimbleby is to launch an innovative new smartphone app that enables people to capture and comment upon landscapes in and around the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

AUSTIN, Texas — In a development that will help predict potential sea level rise from the Antarctic ice sheet, scientists from The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics have used an innovation in radar analysis to accurately image the vast subglacial water system under West Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier.

To implement carbon capture and storage (CCS) successfully, each underground repository will need careful appraisal based on its unique history and setting, according to a new study co-authored by researchers from the University of Bristol. Carbon capture and storage has been heralded as a new technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

With global warming, a study finds, tropical cyclones may become more frequent and intense.

Without stringent emissions reductions, future increases in ocean mercury levels are likely to be greater than anticipated - Environmental researchers at Harvard University have published evidence th

A study of a global warming event that happened 93 million years ago suggests that the Earth can recover from high carbon dioxide emissions faster than previously thought, but that this process takes around 300,000 years after emissions decline. Scientists from Oxford University studied rocks from locations including Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, and South Ferriby, North Lincolnshire, to investigate how chemical weathering of rocks 'rebalanced' the climate after vast amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) were emitted during more than 10,000 years of volcanic eruptions.

Research indicates how man-made boundaries limit patent citations. Scholars have long been interested in tracking "knowledge spillovers," the way technical and intellectual advances spread among communities of researchers and innovators. And a significant body of work has shown that distance matters when it comes to the dissemination of knowledge: advances are more likely to be noted by those nearby to the advance's origin.

5 July 2013 The foothills of the Andes mountains near the southern coast of Peru are captured by the Kompsat-2 satellite.

4 July 2013 Hundreds of individual lava flows are seen frozen in time on the flanks of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System.

Following a major earthquake in southern Chile in 2010, several nearby volcanoes permanently sank several inches into the ground.

The mysterious Ice Worlds of the outer solar system are being brought to life this week at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

The University of Washington research vessel Thomas G. Thompson is loading up for six weeks at sea.

Tracking the growth of dinosaurs and how they changed as they grew is difficult. Using a combination of biomechanical analysis and bone histology, palaeontologists from Beijing, Bristol, and Bonn have shown how one of the best-known dinosaurs switched from four feet to two as it grew. Psittacosaurus , the 'parrot dinosaur' is known from more than 1000 specimens from the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago, of China and other parts of east Asia.

A UW-Madison team endures hardship in the field, where a deceptively calm volcanic site could be spewing lava within weeks The big fault must be around here somewhere.

The Colorado River provides water for more than 30 million people, including those in the fast-growing cities of Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles. Increasing demand for that water combined with reduced flow and the looming threat of climate change have prompted concern about how to manage the basin's water in coming decades.

The Department of Geography, King's College London, has appointed two eminent professors in the field of climate-society interactions.

18 June 2013 The most detailed record of cloud motion in the atmosphere of Venus chronicled by ESA's Venus Express has revealed that the planet's winds have steadily been getting faster over the last six years. Venus is well known for its curious super-rotating atmosphere, which whips around the planet once every four Earth days.

Jim Erickson, University of Michigan, (734) 647-1842, ericksn [a] umich (p) edu or Ben Sherman, NOAA, (202) 253-5256 (cell), ben.sherman [a] noaa (p) gov or Jon Campbell, USGS, (703) 648-4180, joncam

Images taken from space have indicated that some of the world's unmonitored volcanoes may not be as peaceful as we might like to think. Satellite radar has shown that the surfaces of a number of volcanoes within the East African Rift are deforming - inflating and deflating.  "Deformations such as these are typically attributed to magma accumulating and moving underground," said Dr Juliet Biggs , Lecturer in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, "and are often interpreted as pre-eruptive activity.

17 June 2013 ESA's mission to Mars in 2016 has entered the final stage of construction with the signature of a contract today with Thales Alenia Space at the Paris Air & Space Show.

By midcentury, snowfall on Los Angeles-area mountains will be 30 to 40 percent less than it was at the end of the 20th century, according to a UCLA study released today and led by UCLA climate expert Alex Hall.

It's the second leading cause of death by an infectious agent worldwide. Now, University of Toronto Professor Frances Jamieson is tackling drug-resistant tuberculosis with a new, lab-based surveillance system that can track the spread of the disease in real-time.

New tools track planktonic larvae, offer possible solutions to safeguard this $1 billion industry June 13, 2013 MIAMI - June 13, 2013 -The commercial value of spiny lobster ( Panulirus argus ) in the Caribbean reaches $1 billion annually, thus making it one of the most valuable fisheries in the region.

Receiving honorary degree, acclaimed photographer James Balog calls on grads to take action on climate change.

Hundreds of South Yorkshire school children were transported back to the Jurassic era to explore the intriguing world of dinosaurs in a once in a lifetime science lesson at the University of Sheffield today (13 June 2013).

Astronomers know that gravity from Saturn's various moons tug at the planet's rings and make spirals in them. But the catalyst for certain spiral patterns has been difficult to pin down. Now, two Cornell astronomers have determined the source: Saturn itself. The entire planet can vibrate like a bell within periods of a few hours, and these oscillations cause gravitational tugs that, in turn, create the spiral patterns in the rings.

Although scientists have known since the middle of the 19th century that the tropics are teeming with species while the poles harbor relatively few, the origin of the most dramatic and pervasive biodiversity on Earth has never been clear. New research sheds light on how that pattern came about. Furthermore, it confirms that the tropics have been and continue to be the Earth's engine of biodiversity.

A Cornell researcher leads a team that was recently awarded a $585,000 National Open Spaces Sacred Places (OSSP) Award from the TKF Foundation to design, build and research spaces in Joplin, Mo.

Colonies of gannets maintain vast exclusive fishing ranges despite doing nothing to defend their territory from rival colonies, scientists have discovered. A team of researchers led by the University of Leeds and the University of Exeter observed that northern gannets, which can fly hundreds of kilometres on a single fishing trip, avoided visiting the fishing grounds of gannets from neighbouring colonies.

6 June 2013 Dramatic flood events carved this impressive channel system on Mars covering 1.55 million square kilometres, shown here in a stunning new mosaic from ESA's Mars Express.

Analytical methods used to predict stock market movements will be applied to Australian geological data, collected over many decades, to model the evolution of the Australian continent and pinpoint new mineral deposits. The strategy is part of the $12 million Big Data Knowledge Discovery project, in which computer scientists, financial analysts and natural scientists are combining their expertise in a groundbreaking effort to discover information hidden in massive, multi-layered data sets.

Unlocking the mysteries of the Agulhas Current and its effects on global climate June 06, 2013 MIAMI - June 4, 2013 - Oceanography has a new face, and its female.

Chris Brandon of the ROMACONS project collects a sample of ancient Roman concrete drilled from a breakwater in Pozzuoli Bay, near Naples, Italy. The breakwater dates back to around 37 B.C. (D. Bartoli photo, courtesy of J.P. Oleson) In a quest to make concrete more durable and sustainable, an international team of geologists and engineers has found inspiration in the ancient Romans, whose massive concrete structures have withstood the elements for more than 2,000 years.

The chemical secrets of a concrete Roman breakwater that has spent the last 2,000 years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea have been uncovered by an international team of researchers led by Paulo Monteiro of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

3 June 2013 New global maps of Mars released on the 10th anniversary of the launch of ESA's Mars Express trace the history of water and volcanic activity on the Red Planet, and identify sites of special interest for the next generation of Mars explorers.