Some 55% of tropical forests are negatively affected by land use practices and deforestation worldwide. But the ability to penetrate the canopy to see what’s going on has been lacking until now.
Global Ecology’s Greg Asner’s group has developed new airborne methods to peer through the canopy to measure and map, in beautiful 3-D, the underlying vegetation, degradation and deforestation, and the amount of carbon stored and emitted in these forests. (more…)
For the first time in history, a change will be made to the atomic weights of some elements listed on the Table of Standard Atomic Weights of the chemical elements found in the inside covers of chemistry textbooks worldwide.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s (IUPAC) Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights is publishing a new table that will express atomic weights of ten elements as intervals, rather than as single standard values. The new table is the result of cooperative research supported by the U.S. Geological Survey, IUPAC, and other contributing Commission members and institutions. (more…)
The Earth is constantly manufacturing new crust, spewing molten magma up along undersea ridges at the boundaries of tectonic plates. The process is critical to the planet’s metabolism, including the cycle of underwater life and the delicate balance of carbon in the ocean and atmosphere.
Now, scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have observed ocean crust forming in an entirely unexpected way—one that may influence those cycles of life and carbon and, in turn, affect the much-discussed future of the world’s climate.
Working at the Guaymas basin in the Gulf of California, WHOI scientists confirmed what they suspected from brief glimpses of the area during previous missions: The inner Earth is injecting swaths of magma called sills as far as 50 kilometers away from the plate boundary, on each side of the ridge —nearly 10 times farther from such an active ocean ridge than had been observed before.(more…)
For certain kinds of cancer, the most effective therapy does not use x-rays or gamma rays but beams of ions, the electrically charged cores of atoms, including hydrogen ions (protons) and heavier ions such as carbon and neon.
About the image: Beams of heavy ions can target hard-to-reach tumors with great accuracy and with minimal damage to surrounding tissues. Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center. Image credit: Berkeley Lab (more…)
In the aftermath of the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a dispersed oil plume was formed at a depth between 3,600 and 4,000 feet and extending some 10 miles out from the wellhead. An intensive study by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that microbial activity, spearheaded by a new and unclassified species, degrades oil much faster than anticipated. This degradation appears to take place without a significant level of oxygen depletion.
