EurekAlert

(Harvard University) A collaborative, six-year study of carbon dioxide levels in Beijing and surrounding provinces suggests that combustion efficiency, a component of overall energy efficiency, is improving in the region.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) The US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been chosen to lead a consortium for a US-China Clean Energy Research Center on Building Energy Efficiency.

(Imperial College London) The sun's activity has recently affected the Earth's atmosphere and climate in unexpected ways, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. The study, by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Colorado, shows that a decline in the sun's activity does not always mean that the Earth becomes cooler.

(University of Washington) New research adds to growing evidence that, even though the temperature increase associated with a warming climate has been smaller in the tropics, the impact of warming on life could be much greater there than in colder climates.

(University of California -- San Diego) Scientists in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have won a grant to study prevailing mysteries about how chemistry influences climate and atmospheric processes.

(University of Liverpool) Geologists at the University of Liverpool are excavating a 2-million-year-old World Heritage Site in Tanzania to understand how climate variations may have contributed to early human evolution.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Wind power is likely to play a large role in the future of sustainable, clean energy, but wide-scale adoption has remained elusive. Now, researchers have found wind farms' effects on local temperatures and proposed strategies for mediating those effects, increasing the potential to expand wind farms to a utility-scale energy resource.

(Southern Methodist University) SMU scientists will present a detailed report at the 2010 Geothermal Resources Council annual meeting Oct. 24-27 describing the newly discovered geothermal energy resource, hot enough and large enough to support commercial energy production. The project to update SMU's 2004 Geothermal Map of North American was funded by a grant from Google.org.

(Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences, Kyoto University) Knowing how to build nanosized assemblies of polymers (long molecular chains) holds the key to improving a broad range of industrial processes, from the production of nanofibers, filters, and new materials to the manufacture of low-energy, nanoscale circuits and devices.

(University of Victoria) New study shows that 2008 volcano in North Pacific fueled largest phytoplankton bloom in the region since satellite measurements began in 1997. This study has important implications for proposals to seed the oceans with iron to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.