says Mark Stitt at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, Germany.
These were fed then into a mass spectrometer, which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.
a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who announced the discovery on 3 march at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference near Houston,
and rocked by supernova shock waves and cosmic rays. The grains were far harder to catch than the comet particles.
Indian space agency ISRO's first test flight of a homemade cryogenic engine powered by fuels that are liquid at very low temperatures ended in failure on 15 april,
Around four tonnes of Roman lead were transferred on 14 april from a museum on the island of Sardinia to Italy's particle-physics laboratory at Gran Sasso on the mainland.
right), will now be used to shield the CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) detector,
The week ahead 24 april The Hubble Space Telescope was launched 20 years ago on this day.
slideshow and stories from our archive. www. nature. com/hubble 24-28 april About 13,000 scientists are expected at Experimental Biology 2010 in Anaheim, California.
Events Large Hadron Collider ends data drought Physicists have started to gather experimental data from the world's most powerful particle accelerator.
which called for a doubling of research funding in the physical sciences. See go. nature. com/asmylx for more.
says Ingeborg Levin, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Levin is one of many scientists developing air-sampling networks,
One technique relies on the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which occurs in trace amounts in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Levin has been regularly measuring carbon-14 content in air samples from Germany using a version of a Geiger counter,
Eye in the sky The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy has made its first airborne observations
and can make infrared observations that would normally be obscured by water vapour in the lower atmosphere.
The astronomy prizewinners, announced on 27 may, are Charles Bennett of Johns hopkins university in Baltimore, Maryland, and Lyman Page and David Spergel of Princeton university in New jersey.
which maps fluctuations in the microwave background radiation left over from the Big bang. David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California,
the biennial prizes consist of US$1 million each for nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics. http://www. kavliprize. no/7-11 june Governments meet in Busan, South korea,
In particular, he is pushing for NASA to prioritize a mission called the Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (Hyspiri),
says committee-member Peter Clarke, a professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Russell says that the review panel analysed this independently obtained data and produced essentially the same shapes of graph as that reported by the CRU scientists,
US astronomy survey: The US National Academy of Science has released its decadal survey, a much-anticipated report recommending the astronomy
and astrophysics research projects that US agencies should fund over the next ten years. The report, published on 13 august,
says that a space telescope that could search for clues to dark energy and for exoplanets should be top priority for large space activities (projects exceeding US$1 billion).
Michael Tomasello, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, comments on the misconduct investigation into prominent Harvard university psychologist Marc Hauser.
and environmental disasters including the risk of radioactive particles being released from contaminated land around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
and the Nizhni novgorod region southwest of Moscow, according to figures from the Global Fire Monitoring Centre (GFMC), part of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, based at the University of Freiburg in Germany.
the site of the nuclear power plant that exploded in 1986. This has raised fears that radioactive particles could be released into the atmosphere.
Goldammer told Nature that he received unconfirmed reports on 11 august that 200 hectares in the region are alight.
Is there a radiation risk? Not really. Jim Smith, who researches the fate of radioactivity in the environment at the University of Portsmouth,
UK, says he is concerned not that the fires could lead to an increase in dangerous radiation.
Most of the radioactive particles are in the soil rather than in the flammable leaf litter and trees,
he explains. The fires that are currently burning are outside the 30-kilometre exclusion zone around Chernobyl,
and studies have shown that this has resulted in an increase in radiation of less than 1, %says Smith.
Only a small amount of radiation gets re-suspended, so I'm not concerned about damage from inhalation,
In a statement on 11 august, the Russian government said that radiation in the Bryansk region
and low-dose radiation combination, said Vladimir Chouprov, an energy campaigner for Greenpeace Russia, in a statement.
Chinese researchers presented their findings on China's phosphate use at the 4th International Symposium on Phosphorus Dynamics in the Plant-Soil Continuum in Beijing.
which coincided with a radiation or rapid burst of evolution giving rise to many new species during the Ediacaran,
%But Dahl's study suggests that the radiation in the Ediacaran probably occurred in a low-oxygen environment,
tweezers and teaspoons to gather sediment samples into small plastic vials before taking them to an infrared spectrometer set up on a folding table at the edge of the site.
The chemical clues yielded by the spectrometer gave immediate feedback to the diggers as they collected further samples.
he and his colleagues show how infrared spectrometry can reveal the distinctive origins of seemingly identical layers of calcite, a form of calcium carbonate (L. Regev et al.
a nuclear physicist at the Weizmann Institute, is a regular participant in digs, where she can be seen on her hands
Research Milky way's double bubble Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a team of astronomers declared last week that they had discovered two gargantuan'bubbles'of ray-emitting particles extending north and south of our Galaxy's centre (M. Su et al.
Astrophys. J. 724,1044 1082; 2010). ) Researchers think the structures, which measure 15,625 parsecs (50,000 light years) from end to end, formed from a single relatively rapid release of energy equivalent to that from 100,000 supernovae.
The source might have been the birth and death of short-lived, massive stars, or a jet of energetic particles from the black hole at the Galactic Centre.
The factory treated the moths with just enough radiation to damage the chromosomes in their reproductive cells without causing injuries that would prevent their survival in the wild.
and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics.
if the field of science in question was cosmology, say, or paleontology, or some other area without any actual impact on people's lives.
what might happen with ice dynamics (although the authors caution that considerable uncertainty remains about the projections).
But in a way, that's a consequence of failing to acknowledge that all science has these political dynamics.
'According to figures from the Global Fire Monitoring Centre (GFMC), based at the University of Freiburg in Germany and part of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, around 7 million hectares including 800,000 hectares of forest,
east of Chernobyl the site of the nuclear power plant that exploded in 1986 could cause radioactive particles in the soil to be released into the atmosphere.
But the fires didn't resuspend radiation at dangerous levels says Johann Goldammer, a fire ecologist and director of the GFMC.
The extended run will be used by scientists at the particle-physics laboratory CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, to hunt for the elusive Higgs particle at the collider's current collision energies.
Changing the magnetic field may disturb their magnetic orientation, he says, leading to less precision in dance communication.
Synchrotron cuts Under pressure from the nations that fund it, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble
the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Observatory (SOFIA) has published its first images of the sky, focusing on the Orion star-formation complex.
The 2. 5-metre, mid-infrared telescope is mounted on the back of a Boeing 747 that flies in the stratosphere above much of the atmospheric water vapour that absorbs infrared light.
People Murder in Iran Majid Shahriari, an Iranian nuclear physicist, was killed and his wife injured in a bomb attack on 29 november in Tehran.
Satellite sacking The chief executive of a leading German space company has been suspended as from 17 january for allegedly criticizing the European satellite navigation system Galileo,
and publicized in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, claim that Smutny said the Galileo project is a stupid idea and a waste of money.
The deal 墉 subject to parliamentary ratification 墉 gives Brazilian astronomers access to telescopes at three sites in Chile operated by ESO,
and includes the latest results from the Kepler mission's hunt for exoplanets. aas. org/meetings/aas217 10 14 january Researchers meet in Paris to discuss the status of the Planck mission,
Mohamed El Raey, a physicist at the University of Alexandria, told Nature Middle east that support for education,
and the Sun's radiation output. go. nature. com/z3cke6 Â
Livestock plagues are spreading: Nature Newslivestock plagues are on the rise globally, owing to increasingly intensive farming practices and the world's growing taste for meat and other animal products.
People Developing world Romain Murenzi, a physicist and Rwanda's former science minister, was named on 7 february as the new executive director of TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world.
while atomic energy and space also saw double-digit percentage increases. But with the economy booming and inflation running above 8%,
Europe's high-energy physics research centre near Geneva, Switzerland. On 17 april, Israel's cabinet voted to join the lab. Full membership has historically been limited to European nations,
The company also plans to cover the damaged reactors with temporary structures in order to limit the release of radioactivity.
Chernobyl shelter An international fund-raising effort to help decommission the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine seemed on 19 april to have fallen short of its goal.
Wildlife threatened by Fukushima radiation: Nature Newsradiation released by the tsunami-struck Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant could have long-lasting consequences for the natural environment in the vicinity of the damaged Plant scientists estimate that in the first 30 days after the accident on 11 march, trees,
birds and forest-dwelling mammals were exposed to daily doses up to 100 times greater -and fish and marine algae to doses several thousand times greater-than are considered generally safe.
with iodine-131 and caesium-137 being the most abundant (see'Radiation release will hit marine life').
A becquerel is defined as one radioactive decay per second. The team then plugged those concentrations into a piece of software called ERICA (Environmental Risk from Ionising Contaminants) to calculate the radiation dose that various groups of wildlife would have received.
ERICA accounts for factors that are known to affect the rate at which organisms absorb radioisotopes,
The dose rate (measured in milligrays per day) specifies how much radiation is absorbed per kilogram of organic tissue per day
a more biologically meaningful indication of how organisms are affected by exposure to radioactivity. Even so, it's just a rough assessment,
The team found that flatfish, molluscs, crustaceans and brown seaweed offshore of Fukushima received radiation doses that,
Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
the Fukushima accident could help scientists to gain a better understanding of the effects of nuclear radiation on wildlife and the environment.
over how radiation affects the fitness of birds and invertebrates. A recent study2 that reports reduced survival in barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where dose rates are now barely above natural values,
TEPCO's losses The operators of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant announced a net loss of ¥1. 25 trillion (US$15. 3 billion) for the year ending 31 March,
Research Einstein telescope A network of European researchers released designs on 19 may for an ultra-sensitive gravitational-wave observatory.
The'Einstein telescope''to be constructed around 2025, would be ten times more sensitive than even second-generation detectors expected to come online around 2015,
Japanese utility Chubu Electric power has suspended operations at its Hamaoka nuclear power station, which sits in an area considered overdue for a large earthquake.
and funded five decades ago 墉 had confirmed at last predictions of general relativity. The US$750-million satellite flew from 2004 to 2005,
but they also give researchers a unique opportunity to study the effects of radiation on populations that would be impossible to recreate in the lab. Tim Mousseau,
together with an international team, is studying the long-term ecological and health consequences of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine.
finds that bird species with orange feathers living in the fallout zone seem to be more susceptible to radiation than their drabber gray and black fellows1.
otherwise confer protection against radiation damage, and that this molecular trade-off is shaping bird populations around the former nuclear power plant.
One of the team, Anders M ¸ller from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, donned a radiation-protection suit to make four bird-watching trips between 2006 and 2009 to the Red
Forest and other locations around Chernobyl. In a 2007 analysis of the data from the first bird counts made in spring 2006,
and red carotenoid-based pigments showed a decline in abundance as radiation levels increased, though there was no comparable correlation for bird species with melanin-based colouring, such as brown, black and reddish-brown2.
Making phaeomelanin consumes large amounts of a tripeptide called glutathione (GSH) which is an antioxidant molecule that can also protect tissues from radiation damage by mopping up free radicals.
making it more susceptible to radiation. The researchers reanalysed the survey data on 97 bird species in search of differences between orange-brown birds, assigned a phaeomelanin score from 0 to 5 depending on the intensity and extent of the colours,
Eumelanin levels, it turned out, had no correlation with bird abundance in relation to background radiation, but birds with relatively high levels of phaeomelanin became rarer as radiation levels increased.
Biologist Kevin Mcgraw of Arizona State university in Tempe says that pigments are good ecological tools:
Mousseau is now in talks with Japanese colleagues to plan studies there following the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
says that although the radioactive elements released at Fukushima are different from those released at Chernobyl,
whether or not these observations will let us make predictions for other radioactive areas in the world,
The aim is to spot pockets of plant growth by combining a measure of the'greenness'of an area with infrared data that reveal water content.
physicists with the T2k (Tokai to Kamioka) multinational collaboration reported on 15 june (T2k Collaboration http://arxiv. org/abs/1106.2822;
On 17 june, the proton collider, located at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, had delivered exactly one inverse femtobarn of collisions to its detectors.
Physicists hope to eke out 12 before the 26-year-old machine shuts down at the end of September.
The team's work combines physics biochemistry and ecology, beginning with measuring subtle differences in the way the forest canopy absorbs
and reflects solar radiation. The signal varies depending on the leaves'concentrations of nutrients, minerals, pigments such as chlorophyll,
Capable of registering more than 400 frequencies of light, from ultraviolet to infrared, the instrument will take 60,000 measurements per second, with great accuracy.
and brought it to bear in the most advanced airborne imaging spectrometer ever built, says Rob Green,
Nature Newsafter the Fukushima nuclear disaster spewed radiation across northern Japan in March, some feared that farming there would be shut down for years.
But early studies of how the radiation has accumulated in plants and the soil now suggest that farmers in much of the region can go back to work.
and contained low levels of radiation around 9 Â becquerels per kilogram (Bq kg-1;
Furthermore, most of the radiation had accumulated on the leaves and could be washed off, suggesting that the plants were not absorbing dangerous levels of radioisotopes directly from the soil.
with most of the radiation in plants accumulated on their surfaces. Wheat leaves that were open at the time of the greatest fallout were contaminated heavily,
Wheat ears from these plants contained 300-500 Bq kg-1 within the prescribed radiation limit.
but suggests that cleaning up the more radioactive public spaces in Fukushima prefecture will not be easy.
led by radiation expert Tomoya Yamauchi, has found that soil radiation levels at four sites in Fukushima city,
some 60 kilometres from the reactors, measured up to 47,000 Bq kg-1 surpassing the 10,000 Bq kg-1 human exposure safety level set by the government.
and leaving it as radioactive mounds in the corners of school playgrounds. The agriculture ministry is also testing how well plants can clean the soil in highly contaminated areas,
you're still left with the problem of how to dispose of the radioactive plants. Burying the soil is expensive, however.
People cannot rebuild their lives until the radiation risks are understood and a plan for reducing them is in place.
borrowing a concept from US astronomers and astrophysicists, who survey their field once a decade to identify scientific priorities and rank potential projects.
We're getting more like the physical sciences in the sense that we have to have bigger projects with enormous amounts of information,
Although the decadal surveys of the astronomers take years to pull together, Stacey and organizers at the American Society of Plant Biologists hope to issue a report by early 2012,
California. sites. agu. org/fallmeeting5-9 december The first conference on the scientific results from the Kepler exoplanet mission takes place at the NASA Ames Research Park, Moffett Field,
COMCATTLE seem to align with magnetic field lines, but researchers are in disagreement over the finding. A follow-up study by Burda and his colleagues showed no such alignment near electric power lines,
The Genkai Nuclear power Plant in southwestern Japan was shut down briefly in October because of a technical fault,
astronomers geared up this week for a fantastic view of an asteroid called 2005 YU55.
Nobel physicist dies Atomic physicist Norman Ramsey, who shared the 1989 Nobel prize in Physics, died on 4 november, aged 96.
where he developed improved methods for probing atomic structure by measuring the response to electromagnetic radiation.
For a more consistent picture, he and his colleagues charted the population dynamics of woolly mammoths
NASA science head John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and astronaut who carried out repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope
A twin Earth NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: discovering another Earth-sized planet.
which is about 290 parsecs (946 light years) away from us, researchers reported on 20 december at a press conference and in Nature (F. Fressin et al.
Nuclear cleanup The Japanese government has threatened to withhold about ¥1 trillion (US$12. 8 billion) in rescue funds for the private company that runs the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant,
its main research payload was the Italian Space agency's Laser Relativity Satellite (LARES, pictured: sphere on top of the rocket's payload) which will study the Lense-Thirring effect,
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, mapped every position in the genome an average of 30 times, improving on the 1. 9-fold coverage in their 2010
PEOPLE China science prize Chinese physicist Xie Jialin, who pioneered the building of China's first high-energy linear particle accelerator in 1964,
these atoms are unaffected by the Sun's magnetic field. Mccomas says that it takes about 30 years for particles to cross the bubble wall at the heliosphere s edge
(which astronomers can measure by looking at the absorption features of the light from distant stars).
Ancient text gives clue to mysterious radiation spikean eerie red crucifix seen in Britain's evening sky in ad 774 may be unrecognized a previously supernova explosion
The spike probably came from a burst of high-energy radiation striking the upper atmosphere, increasing the rate at
which carbon-14 is formed (see'Mysterious radiation burst recorded in tree rings').'But there was a problem:
the only known causes of such radiation are supernova explosions or gigantic solar flares, and the researchers knew of no such events in ad 774 or 775,
Such a cloud might also prevent any remnants of the proposed supernova being seen by modern astronomers.
an astronomer at Chicago's Adler Planetarium in Illinois, who has used the Anglo-saxon Chronicle to investigate past astronomical events,
says Donald Olson, a physicist with an interest in historical astronomy at Texas State university in San marcos,
Plenty of supernovae now known to astronomers are simply missing in the historical record, says Gyuk.
The low-cost mission is one of only a few available to X-ray astronomers. See go. nature. com/dcye8k for more.
To Tom Manney, an emeritus professor of biology and physics at Kansas State university, which is located adjacent to the NBAF site,
Higgs papers Researchers at ATLAS and the CMS, the two main physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, posted their papers describing a new Higgs-boson-like
D. PARKER/SPLBERNARD Lovell dies Physicist and radio astronomer Bernard Lovell who founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory at the University of Manchester,
Since he started as the high-energy physics lab s fifth director in 2005, Oddone has overseen the final years of the lab s Tevatron particle collider
and 146 papers that had more than 1, 000 authors most of them in physics
Brazil s fund for low-carbon agriculture lies fallowrice cultivation has received a boost in Brazil
which is around 5, 000 parsecs from Earth. See go. nature. com/ya5y2p for more.
including a new wave of investment in nuclear power. These steps will strengthen American industry, reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
although rapid radiations have occurred throughout time and space, the rate of speciation has increased sharply over the past 40 million years.
according to"very preliminary results presented by Sergey Bulat of the Petersburg Nuclear physics Institute in Gatchina, Russia, at the 12th European Workshop on Astrobiology in Stockholm on 16 october.
the European commission ran safety tests that included all 145 reactors at nuclear power plants in the European union.
The physics prize was won by Serge Haroche and David Wineland, for their experiments in quantum optics.
including microbiologist Sarkis Mazmanian, astronomer Olivier Guyon and marine ecologist Nancy Rabalais. The awards, popularly known as genius grants, come with no strings attached as to how the money is spent. see go. nature. com/ru2vgy for more.
Telescope array One of the world's most powerful radio-telescope arrays, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, was opened officially on 5 october at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western australia.
and from the Kepler mission searching for extrasolar planets, are announced at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada. www. psi. edu/dps12
says atmospheric physicist David Crisp of NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is the science team leader of OCO-2."A timely launch of this satellite should be among the highest priorities of ESA.
Willy Benz of the University of Bern, chair of ESA s Space science Advisory Committee, says that this could force the agency to delay a future large mission;
and the ant behavior and signaling dynamics could add to research about pest control for agriculture.
which used satellite measurements to estimate forest greenness using reflected solar radiation is that the data can be muddied by clouds and atmospheric aerosols.
Funder concessions The Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Britain s biggest public funder of physics
an infrared sensor scans the horizon, silently mapping carbon dioxide levels across Los angeles. In the city below,
Tuned to near-infrared wavelengths, the sensor measures the proportion of the heat being absorbed by CO2,
and NASA will contribute 20 infrared detectors, valued at around $50 million in total, for one of the instruments on the spacecraft.
As increasing force (as measured in newtons) is applied to the diamond pyramid, the material s ability to resist indentation levels off at its so-called asymptotic value (as measured in gigapascals).
The data in the new study only show how the nano-twinned boron nitride responded to indentation loads with up to seven newtons of force."
In that work, published in Applied Physics Letters, Dubrovinskaia and her colleagues presented data from Vickers testing with loads of up to 10 newtons
and three deformable mirrors, allowing astronomers to correct for atmospheric distortions over an exceptionally large field of view.
On 9 Â January, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long beach, California, astronomers unveiled the telescope s ultra-sharp portrait of the bullets of gas seen in the Orion Nebula.
according to researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They presented their study on 7 Â January at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long beach,
by using sucrose to lure them into a Faraday pail an electrically shielded bucket that reacts to the charge of anything inside it.
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