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Categories: Mathematics: Modeling, Paleontology: Climate

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An international drilling expedition off the Norwegian coast confirms the theory that methane emissions from hydrothermal vents were responsible for global warming about 55 million years ago. The study shows that the vents were active in very shallow water depth or even above sea level, which would have allowed much larger amounts of methane to enter the atmosphere.

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A new technique incorporates many different building blocks of cellular metamaterials into one unified graph-based representation. This can be used to make a user-friendly interface that can quickly and easily model metamaterials, edit the structures, and simulate their properties.

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A chemical process used in the browning of food to give it its distinct smell and taste is probably happening deep in the oceans, where it helped create the conditions necessary for life. Known as the Maillard reaction after the French scientist who discovered it, the process converts small molecules of organic carbon into bigger molecules known as polymers. In the kitchen, it is used to create flavors and aromas out of sugars. But a research team argues that on the sea floor, the process has had a more fundamental effect, where it has helped to raise oxygen and reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, to create the conditions for complex life forms to emerge and thrive on Earth.

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A patch of ocean in the North Atlantic is stubbornly cooling while much of the planet warms. This anomaly -- dubbed the 'cold blob' -- has been linked to changes in ocean circulation, but a new study found changes in large-scale atmospheric patterns may play an equally important role, according to an international research team.

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An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists has uncovered an unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics, that reveals key insights into the structure of neutral mutations and the evolution of organisms.

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In past ice ages, the intensity of summer insolation affected the emergence of warm and cold periods and played an important role in triggering abrupt climate changes, a study by climate researchers, geoscientists, and environmental physicists suggests. Using stalagmites in the European Alps, they were able to demonstrate that warm phases appeared primarily when the summer insolation reached maxima in the Northern Hemisphere.

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Scientists have trained a machine learning model in outer space, on board a satellite. This achievement could revolutionize the capabilities of remote-sensing satellites by enabling real-time monitoring and decision making for a range of applications.

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A new machine-learning technique can efficiently learn to control a robot, leading to better performance with fewer data.

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Enzymes play a key role in cellular metabolic processes. To enable the quantitative assessment of these processes, researchers need to know the so-called 'turnover number' (for short: kcat) of the enzymes. A team of bioinformaticians now describes a tool for predicting this parameter for various enzymes using AI methods.

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A large portion of Greenland was an ice-free tundra landscape -- perhaps covered by trees and roaming woolly mammoths -- in the recent geologic past (about 416,000 years ago), a new study shows. The results help overturn a previous view that much of the Greenland ice sheet persisted for most of the last two and a half million years. Instead, moderate warming, from 424,000 to 374,000 years ago, led to dramatic melting. At that time, the melting of Greenland caused at least five feet of sea level rise, despite atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide being far lower than today (280 vs. 420 ppm). This indicates that the ice sheet on Greenland may be more sensitive to human-caused climate change than previously understood -- and will be vulnerable to irreversible, rapid melting in coming centuries.

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A team has combined economic theory with biology to understand how natural systems respond to change. The researchers noticed a similarity between consumers' shopping behavior and the behavior of metabolic systems, which convert food into energy in our bodies. The team focused on predicting how different metabolic systems might respond to environmental change by using an economic tool called the Slutsky equation. Their calculations indicated that very different metabolic systems actually share previously unknown universal properties, and can be understood using tools from other academic fields. Metabolic processes are used in drug development, bioengineering, food production and other industries, so being able to predict how such systems will respond to change can offer many benefits.

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Using Japan's most powerful supercomputer, researchers reproduced cases of clear air turbulence around Tokyo. They simulated the fine vortices responsible for this dangerous phenomenon. The usefulness of the simulation in predicting turbulence was confirmed by comparing simulation data with data from aircraft recordings. This research should improve the forecasting of turbulence.

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Structural engineers are familiar with seventeenth-century scientist Robert Hooke's theory that a hanging chain will mirror the shape of an upstanding rigid arch. However, new research now shows that this common-held belief is incorrect because, regardless of the similarities, the hanging chain and the arch are two incompatible mechanical systems.

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An international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene. A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages.

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Research shows global cooling of the climate 10 million years ago led to an explosion of diversity in terrestrial orchids.

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Board games based on numbers, like Monopoly, Othello and Chutes and Ladders, make young children better at math, according to a comprehensive review of research published on the topic over the last 23 years.

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The arrangement of electrons in matter, known as the electronic structure, plays a crucial role in fundamental but also applied research such as drug design and energy storage. However, the lack of a simulation technique that offers both high fidelity and scalability across different time and length scales has long been a roadblock for the progress of these technologies. Researchers have now pioneered a machine learning-based simulation method that supersedes traditional electronic structure simulation techniques. Their Materials Learning Algorithms (MALA) software stack enables access to previously unattainable length scales.

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Researchers are using a new model to clarify why millions of years ago more animal species from Asia made the leap to the Australian continent than vice versa. The climate in which the species evolved played an important role.

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As the Arctic warms, shrinking glaciers are exposing bubbling groundwater springs which could provide an underestimated source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, finds new research.

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A solution for temporal asymmetry -- or entropy production -- in thermodynamics has been developed to further our understanding of the behavior of biological systems, machine learning, and AI tools. The researchers worked on the time-irreversible Ising model dynamics caused by asymmetric connections between neurons.