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44 articles from PhysOrg

Hurricane puts 10 million in the crosshairs in Florida

An increasingly alarming Hurricane Dorian menaced a corridor of some 10 million people—and put Walt Disney World and President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in the crosshairs—as it steamed toward Florida on Friday with the potential to become the most powerful storm to hit the state's east coast in nearly 30 years.

NASA satellites on-hand as Dorian becomes a category 3 hurricane

As Hurricane Dorian was upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, NASA's fleet of satellites were gathering data during the day to assist weather forecasters and scientists. At 2:00 pm EDT the National Hurricane Center (NHC) posted a supplemental advisory. NHC reports that "extremely dangerous Hurricane Dorian poses a significant threat to Florida and the...

Early start of 20th century arctic sea ice decline

Boulder, Colo., USA: Arctic sea-ice has decreased rapidly during the last decades in concert with substantial global surface warming. Both have happened much faster than predicted by climate models, and observed Arctic warming is much stronger than the global average. Projections suggest that Arctic summer sea-ice may virtually disappear within the course of the next fifty or even thirty years.

Moving faster in a crowd

Cell particles move more quickly through a crowded cellular environment when the crowding molecules are non-uniformly distributed. New research also shows that particle transport in crowded cells can actually be faster than movement in a non-crowded environment as long as the particles are moving from densely crowded areas to less crowded areas. Understanding the rate at which particles move in...

Breakthrough enables storage and release of mechanical waves without energy loss

Light and sound waves are at the basis of energy and signal transport and fundamental to some of our most basic technologies—from cell phones to engines. Scientists, however, have yet to devise a method that allows them to store a wave intact for an indefinite period of time and then direct it toward a desired location on demand. Such a development would greatly facilitate the ability to...

Scientists discover evidence for past high-level sea rise

An international team of scientists, studying evidence preserved in speleothems in a coastal cave, illustrate that more than three million years ago—a time in which the Earth was two to three degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial era—sea level was as much as 16 meters higher than the present day. Their findings represent significant implications for understanding and predicting the...

Hurricane Dorian marching slowly across Atlantic

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) in Miami reports that an Air Force plane is finding Dorian a "little stronger" as of the 8:00am EDT advisory put out today, Aug. 30, 2019. Data from an Air Force Reserve reconnaissance aircraft indicate that maximum sustained winds have increased to near 110 mph (175 km/h) with higher gusts. That is in keeping with what weather forecasters are predicting for...

Scientist identifies cone snail's strike as one of the quickest in the animal kingdom

With the use of ultra-high-speed videography, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Associate Professor Emanuel Azizi and colleagues from Occidental College Los Angeles have shed light on the hunting mechanism of the cone snail Conus catus. Published online in Current Biology - Cell Press, the researchers identified the snail's hydraulically propelled feeding structure as the quickest movement among...

Research team aims to reduce cost of drug development using 3-D-printed living tissues

Thomas E. Angelini, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida and his research group, the Soft Matter Engineering lab have successfully fabricated living micro-beams from glioblastoma cells and extra-cellular material (ECM) embedded in a packed microgel support medium. They subsequently characterized the physical properties of...

Illinois engineer continues to make waves in water desalination

For the past several years, University of Illinois researcher Kyle Smith has proven his growing expertise in the field of water desalination, with a range of research results that could address the immediate need to combat diminishing clean water sources around the world.

Glauconite can become an eco-friendly alternative to potassium fertilizers

Scientists from Tomsk Polytechnic University are studying the mineral glauconite as an eco-friendly and effective alternative to traditional potassium fertilizers exploited in agriculture. Their recent study showed that glauconite-bearing rocks can be as efficient as traditional fertilizers to increase the wheat yield even with minimum soil cultivation. Glauconite also does not leave any harmful...

Exoplanets can't hide their secrets from innovative new instrument

In an unprecedented feat, an American research team discovered hidden secrets of an elusive exoplanet using a powerful new instrument at the 8-meter Gemini North telescope on Maunakea in Hawai'i. The findings not only classify a Jupiter-sized exoplanet in a close binary star system, but also conclusively demonstrate, for the first time, which star the planet orbits.