Search Results for: ocean

From mollusks to mammals, newly discovered chemical pathways of serotonin in the nervous system are paving a path toward future pharmaceutical treatments for depression and other disorders.

“Understanding novel serotonin pathways in a tissue-dependent manner is useful for the development of pharmaceuticals intended to preserve serotonergic signaling,” said Jeffrey N. Stuart, a doctoral student in the department of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Plankton poo could be the key to understanding how much carbon dioxide our oceans can store according to Tasmanian researcher Dr Karin Beaumont.

The greenhouse effect is arguably humanity’s greatest environmental threat. “We need to understand where and how carbon dioxide is stored in the oceans. Part of the answer lies in the poo of microscopic zooplankton: does it float or does it sink?” said Karin. “Heavy poo that sticks together and sinks to the ocean floor is good. It locks u

Quake researchers ’look’ deep inside fault with cold war-era gravity sensor

Using classified technology developed by the military during the Cold War, a team of geoscientists led by Rice University’s Manik Talwani is conducting a first-of-its-kind experiment on California’s famed San Andreas fault this week. The researchers will gather data that could give scientists a much clearer picture of the fault’s “gouge zone,” a region 2-3 kilometers beneath the eart

Hurricanes are one of those forces of nature that can only fully be captured by satellite imagery. For Hurricane Frances, currently thundering towards the United States coast, ESA’s Envisat is going one better, peering through the hurricane from top to bottom, even helping to ’see’ under the waves to map hidden forces powering the storm.

As its 235-km-per-hour winds passed the Bahamas, Frances was heading for landfall on the Florida coast some time on Saturday, and three quarters

One of the Sun’s greatest mysteries is about to be unravelled by UK solar astrophysicists hosting a major international workshop at the University of St Andrews from September 6-9th 2004. For years scientists have been baffled by the ’coronal heating problem’: why it is that the light surface of the Sun (and all other solar-like stars) has a temperature of about 6000 degrees Celsius, yet the corona (the crown of light we see around the moon at a total eclipse) is at a temperature of

Were E.T. really interested in getting in touch with home, he might be better off writing than phoning, according to Christopher Rose, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Rose contends that inscribing information and physically sending it to some location in deep space is more energy-efficient than pulsing it out on radio waves, which disperse as they travel.

“Think of a flashlight beam,” Rose says. “Its intensity d