Science News Archive - August 01, 2011

Nearly 12 percent of the contiguous US land area experienced record drought in July, reaching the highest levels in the history of the US Drought Monitor.

Crop circles, the often-extraordinary patterns that have appeared in many fields in Europe and around the world, could possibly be the work of high-tech methods such as the use of GPS.

The EPA on Thursday proposed new standards to reduce harmful air pollution caused from oil and gas drilling operations, including the first standard for wells that are hydraulically fractured.

Long-awaited, continent-wide network of environmental observing sites gets off the ground.

Scientists on the Norwich Research Park, working with colleagues in China, have developed new techniques that will aid the application of genomics to breeding the improved varieties of crop needed to ensure food security in the future.

Whatever does not kill a plant may actually make it stronger.

Even in trace quantities, the radioactive gas radon is very dangerous; it is second only to cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer deaths in the United States.

Replacing gasoline and diesel with plant-based bio fuels is crucial to curb climate change.

No-one likes a know-it-all but we expect to be able to catch them out: someone who acts like they know everything but doesn't can always be tripped up with a well-chosen question.

Physicists at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the universities of Kiel and Hamburg are the first to discover a regular lattice of stable magnetic skyrmions – radial spiral structures made up of atomic-scale spins – on a surface instead of in bulk materials.