Come one, come all to the science gathering of the day. Science talk is here. New discoveries, new takes on old knowledge, and other bits of news are all available for the perusing in today's information world. Over the fold are selections from the past week from a few of the many excellent science news sites around the world. Today's tidbits include a novel superconducting material, ancient humans were mixing it up, bedrock nitrogen may help forests buffer climate change, new material shows promise for trapping pollutants in water, first global portrait of greenhouse gases emerges, U.S. experiences the second warmest summer on record, algae polymer may improve battery performance, and 800,000 years of abrupt climate variability. Pull up that comfy chair and bask in the sunshine. There is plenty of room for everyone. Get ready for another session of Dr. Possum's science education and entertainment.
Featured Stories
Potential new class of superconducting materials arose when scientists sandwiched two nonmagnetic insulators together and discovered a startling result: The layer where the two materials meet has both magnetic and superconducting regions – two properties that normally can’t co-exist.
Technologists have long hoped to find a way to engineer magnetism in this class of materials, called complex oxides, as a first step in developing a potential new form of computing memory for storage and processing.
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A critical next step: Figuring out whether the superconductivity and magnetism co-exist within the material in an uneasy truce, or whether this marks the discovery of an exotic new form of superconductivity that actively interacts with magnetism, said Moler. Superconducting materials, which conduct electricity with no resistance and 100 percent efficiency, normally expel any magnetic field that comes near them.
Recent research indicates ancient humans interbred more than once thought.
It is now widely accepted that anatomically modern humans of the species Homo sapiens originated in Africa and eventually spread throughout the world. Ancient DNA recovered from fossil Neanderthal bones suggests they interbred with more archaic hominin forms once they had left their evolutionary cradle for the cooler climates of Eurasia, but whether they exchanged genetic material with other, now extinct archaic hominin varieties in Africa remained unclear.
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According to (researacher) Hammer, the first signs of anatomically modern features appeared about 200,000 years ago. Non-modern varieties of Homo are thought to have emerged about 300,000 years earlier and have survived until as recently as 30,000 years ago or even later.
As climate change continues the response of all plants and animals is being studied.
Data from the study indicate that the amount of carbon stored in forest soils derived from the nitrogen-rich bedrock was nearly twice that of sites associated with nitrogen-poor rocks in Northern California. Furthermore, the researchers used the inventory of forest growth data from the National Forest Service to determine that this was not just a localized effect. In fact, the productivity of forests growing on nitrogen-rich rock was approximately 50 percent higher than the productivity of forests growing on nitrogen-poor rocks throughout Northern California and into Oregon.
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The researchers stress that, since nitrogen tends to be elevated in rocks of sedimentary origin, which cover roughly 75 percent of the Earth’s land surface, the discovery that bedrock nitrogen has the potential to stimulate forest productivity and carbon storage has tremendous global significance.
While water filters are good at trapping positive ions many pollutants form negatively charged particles.
...a new type of material that can soak up negatively-charged pollutants from water. The new material, which they call SLUG-26, could be used to treat polluted water through an ion exchange process similar to water softening. In a water softener, sodium ions weakly attached to a negatively-charged resin are exchanged for the hard-water minerals, which are held more tightly by the resin. SLUG-26 provides a positively-charged substrate that can exchange a nontoxic negative ion for the negatively-charged pollutants.
If the material works out as hoped a big use may be in trapping technetium in radioactive waste.
A study of global greenhouse gases made with pole to pole flights offers an unprecedented view of gases and particles in the atmosphere.
The team measured a total of over 80 gases and particles in the atmosphere.
One of HIPPO’s most significant accomplishments has been quantifying the seasonal amounts of CO2 taken up and released by land plants and the oceans. Those measurements will help scientists produce more accurate estimates of the annual cycle of carbon dioxide in and out of the atmosphere and how the increasing amount of this gas is influenced by both the natural world and society.
The team also found that black carbon particles—emitted by diesel engines, industrial processes, and fires—are more widely distributed in the atmosphere than previously thought. Such particles can affect climate in various ways, such as directly absorbing solar radiation, influencing the formation of clouds or enhancing melt rates when they are deposited on ice or snow.
For those who thought the summer was warm this year the data shows the U.S. had the second warmest summer on record.
The average U.S. temperature in August was 75.7 degrees F, which is 3.0 degrees above the long-term (1901-2000) average, while the summertime temperature was 74.5 degrees F, which is 2.4 degrees above average. The warmest August on record for the contiguous United States was 75.8 degrees F in 1983, while its warmest summer on record at 74.6 degrees F occurred in 1936. Precipitation across the nation during August averaged 2.31 inches, 0.29 inches below the long-term average. The nationwide summer precipitation was 1.0 inch below average.
As the ongoing search for better battery performance continues a new polymer may aid the process by providing a better binder and replacing some toxic substances used today in lithium-ion batteries.
Known as alginate, the material is extracted from common, fast-growing brown algae. In tests so far, it has helped boost energy storage and output for both graphite-based electrodes used in existing batteries and silicon-based electrodes being developed for future generations of batteries.
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Finding just the right material is an important step toward improving the performance of lithium-ion batteries, which are essential to a broad range of applications, from cars to cell phones. The popular and lightweight batteries work by transferring lithium ions between two electrodes — a cathode and an anode — through a liquid electrolyte. The more efficiently the lithium ions can enter the two electrodes during charge and discharge cycles, the larger the battery's capacity will be.
Existing lithium-ion batteries rely on anodes made from graphite, a form of carbon. Silicon-based anodes theoretically offer as much as a tenfold capacity improvement over graphite anodes, but silicon-based anodes so far have not been stable enough for practical use.
An international team of scientists has produced a record of what the Greenland climate may have been over the last 800,000 years.
Drill cores taken from Greenland’s vast ice sheets provided the first clue that Earth’s climate is capable of very rapid transitions and have led to vigorous scientific investigation into the possible causes of abrupt climate change.
Such evidence comes from the accumulation of layers of ancient snow, which compact to form the ice-sheets we see today. Each layer of ice can reveal past temperatures and even evidence for the timing and magnitude of distant storms or volcanic eruptions. By drilling cores in the ice scientists have reconstructed an incredible record of past climates. Until now such temperature records from Greenland have covered only the last 100,000 years or so.
Other Worthy Stories of the Week
Wing secrets that help insects rule the world Photo diary.
The future of light is the LED
Neutrinos: Ghostly particles with unstable egos
Breakthrough could double wireless capacity without new cell towers
Promiscuity in female birds results in more offspring
Protecting wild species may require growing more food on less land
Giant carnivorous bird roamed many continents
Evidence for a persistently iron-rich ocean changes views on Earth's early history
'Game changer' in evolution from South African bones
Royal Observatory's astronomy photo winners Photos, photos.
Young stars take a turn in the spotlight
Invasive forest insects cost homeowners, taxpayers billions
Scientists find nearly all deep sea fisheries unsustainable
Switching from coal to natural gas would do little for global climate, study indicates
Researchers predict extreme summertime temperatures to become a regular occurrence
Invisible world discovered
New record for measurement of atomic lifetime
Researchers identify insect host species of a famous Tibetan medicinal fungus
For even more science news:
General Science Collectors:
Alpha-Galileo
BBC News Science and Environment
Eureka Science News
LiveScience
New Scientist
PhysOrg.com
SciDev.net
Science/AAAS
Science Alert
Science Centric
Science Daily
Scientific American
Space Daily
Blogs:
A Few Things Ill Considered Techie and Science News
Cantauri Dreams space exploration
Coctail Party Physics Physics with a twist.
Deep Sea News marine biology
Laelaps more vertebrate paleontology
List of Geoscience Blogs
ScienceBlogs
Space Review
Techonology Review
Tetrapod Zoologyvertebrate paleontology
Science Insider
Scientific Blogging.
Space.com
Wired News
Science RSS Feed: Medworm
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe--a combination of hard science and debunking crap
At Daily Kos:
This Week in Science by DarkSyde
Overnight News Digest:Science Saturday by Neon Vincent. OND tech Thursday by rfall.
Pique the Geek by Translator Sunday evenings about 9 Eastern time
All diaries with the DK GreenRoots Tag.
All diaries with the eKos Tag
A More Ancient World by matching mole
Astro Kos
SciTech at Dkos.
Sunday Science Videos by palantir
NASA picture of the day. For more see the NASA image gallery or the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
The Moon's North Pole, NASA, Public Domain