ANN ARBOR, Mich.— North American forests appear to have a greater capacity to soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas than researchers had previously anticipated.
As a result, they could help slow the pace of human-caused climate warming more than most scientists had thought, a U-M ecologist and his colleagues have concluded. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— After the last ice age peaked about 18,000 years ago, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide rose about 30 percent. Scientists believe that the additional carbon dioxide—a heat-trapping greenhouse gas—played a key role in warming the planet and melting the continental ice sheets. They have long hypothesized that the source of the gas was the deep ocean.
But a new study by a University of Michigan paleoclimatologist and two colleagues suggests that the deep ocean was not an important source of carbon during glacial times. The finding will force researchers to reassess their ideas about the fundamental mechanisms that regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide over long time scales. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— The solar wind sandblasts the surface of planet Mercury at its poles, according to new data from a University of Michigan instrument on board NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft.
The sodium and oxygen particles the blistering solar wind kicks up are the primary components of Mercury’s wispy atmosphere, or “exosphere,” the new findings assert. Through interacting with the solar wind, they become charged in a mechanism that’s similar to the one that generates the Aurora Borealis on Earth. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— How common are droplets of saltwater on Mars? Could microbial life survive and reproduce in them? A new million-dollar NASA project led by the University of Michigan aims to answer those questions.
This project begins three years after beads of liquid brine were first photographed on one of the Mars Phoenix lander’s legs.
“On Earth, everywhere there’s liquid water, there is microbial life,” said Nilton Renno, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences who is the principal investigator. Researchers from NASA, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Georgia and the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid are also involved. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A study links low vitamin D in young girls with early menstruation, which is a risk factor for a host of health problems for teen girls as well as women later in life.
Researchers from the University of Michigan School of Public Health measured the blood vitamin D levels in 242 girls ages 5-12 from Bogota, Colombia, and followed them for 30 months. Girls low on vitamin D were twice as likely to start menstruation during the study than those with sufficient vitamin D, said epidemiologist Eduardo Villamor, associate professor in the U-M SPH. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A radical new approach to thwarting Internet censorship would essentially turn the whole web into a proxy server, making it virtually impossible for a censoring government to block individual sites.
The system is called Telex, and it is the brainchild of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo in Canada. They will present it Aug. 12 at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A full 25 percent of blog posts about politics occur on sites that are primarily about something else, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan School of Information. And when authors post about politics, their readers reply and engage with the political content of the posts.
The researchers say they have uncovered a significant repository of political discourse that is largely being ignored. They will present their findings July 19 at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Barcelona. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— A new study from the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh shows that even if a child isn’t crying, frowning or displaying other negative emotions on a consistent basis, another warning sign is when a child shows fewer positive displays, like hugging a parent or smiling and laughing.
“Surprisingly, it seems that it is low levels of happiness, as opposed to high levels of sadness, what may help explain why these kids too often develop depressive disorders,” said Nestor Lopez-Duran, an assistant professor of psychology at U-M and one of the study’s authors. (more…)
