Turbidity currents have historically been described as fast-moving currents that sweep down submarine canyons, carrying sand and mud into the deep sea. But a new paper in Nature Communications shows that, rather than just consisting of sediment-laden seawater flowing over the seafloor, turbidity currents also involve large-scale movements of the seafloor itself. This dramatic discovery, the result of an 18-month-long, multi-institutional study of Monterey Canyon, could help ocean engineers avoid damage to pipelines, communications cables, and other seafloor structures.

Scientists at the University of Toronto have found a way to select the outcome of chemical reactions by employing an elusive and long-sought factor known as the impact parameter.

Hurricane Sergio continued to look impressive on satellite imagery when NOAA’s GOES-West satellite viewed the storm in infrared light.

Rice University scientists have developed something akin to the Venus’ flytrap of particles for water remediation.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over Tropical Storm Kong-Rey and analyzed the rates in which rain was falling throughout the storm.

NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the Central Atlantic Ocean and obtained infrared data on Leslie, now weakened to a large tropical storm.

Alaska’s land mass is equal to the size of one-fifth of the continental United States, yet stores about half of the country’s terrestrial – both upland and wetland –  carbon stores and fluxes. The carbon is not only stored in vegetation and soil, but also in vital freshwater ecosystems even though lakes and ponds, rivers, streams, and springs only cover a small amount of landmass in Alaska.

Researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the University of Bonn have investigated which activity patterns occur in the brain when people remember or forget things. They were interested in how the brain replays and stores during sleep what it had learned before. The team recorded the brain activity of epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted into their brain for the purpose of surgical planning. One result: During sleep, the brain even reactivates memory traces that it can no longer remember later on.

Species-rich subtropical forests can take up, on average, twice as much carbon as monocultures. This has been reported by an international research team in the professional journal SCIENCE. The study was carried out as part of a unique field experiment conducted under the direction of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The experiment comprises forests grown specifically for this purpose in China; for the study, data from experimental plots with a total of over 150,000 trees were analysed. The researchers believe that the results speak in favour of using many different tree species during reforestation. Thus, both species conservation and climate protection can be promoted.

Engineers at ANU have invented a semiconductor with organic and inorganic materials that can convert electricity into light very efficiently, and it is thin and flexible enough to help make devices such as mobile phones bendable.