Lake District grasslands could be playing an important role in the fight against global warming.Grasslands cover a vast area of the UK, forming the backbone of the livestock industry. However, they also play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle, storing vast amounts of carbon beneath them in their soils.New research is being carried out by scientists from the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, to work out how much carbon is being stored in UK grasslands and find out if it could potentially store even more. This would contribute to climate change mitigation, because carbon locked in soils isn't being released into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming.Teams of scientists from the Universities of Lancaster and Reading, and North Wyke Research, have begun sampling a large number of sites across England, including grasslands in the Lake District at Glenridding, Grasmere, Thirlmere, the Newlands Valley and Skiddaw, and in the Yorkshire Dales. »

Ah, the cool, refreshing feel of air conditioning on a sweltering summer day.Ugh, the discomfort when those energy bills in July, August and September come due -- $200, $400, $600 or more.Feel miserable, or dig deep into your wallet -- not much of a choice for the 250 million Americans who live in climates where heat, humidity or both are a Catch-22 for three to 12 months a year.A soothing solution may be on its way, thanks to a melding of technologies in filters, coolers and drying agents.The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has invented a new air conditioning process with the potential of using 50 percent to 90 percent less energy than today's top-of-the-line units. It uses membranes, evaporative cooling and liquid desiccants in a way that has never been done before in the centuries-old science of removing heat from the air."The idea is to revolutionize cooling, while removing millions of metric tons of carbon from the air," NREL mechanical engineer Eric Kozubal, co-inventor of the Desiccant-Enhanced eVaporative air conditioner (DEVap), said."We'd been working with membranes, evaporative coolers and desiccants. We saw an opportunity to combine them into a single device for a product with unique capabilities." »

A University of Miami (UM) researcher will be presenting his work on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the 14th annual RoboCup World Championship and Symposium, an international robotic event whose goal is to advance AI and intelligent robotics research. Ubbo Visser, research associate professor of computer science at UM College of Arts and Sciences and team leader for the UM robotics team RoboCanes, will describe the architecture of the multiagent system (MAS) and discuss motion capture techniques for graphical animation.Visser will share his findings in a paper titled: "TopLeague & Bundesliga Manager: New generation online soccer games" and participate in the 3D simulation soccer league with the RoboCanes, designed by the AI & Games group at UM. The event will take place in Singapore, June 19-25."The idea of using soccer as a test bed for robots is to learn about the needs of agents, or robots that act in real-time, dynamic, and adversarial environments," says Visser. "To understand what it takes for a robot to integrate knowledge and put information into context so that it can make decisions in a split second: that is one of the hardest problems in AI and robotics to solve right now."RoboCup (originally called The Robot World Cup Soccer Games and Conferences) started in 1997, and over the years has become the prevalent robotics competition in the world. The primary focus of the event is soccer games; it involves more than 3,000 researchers, about 450 teams and participants from over 40 countries.For the event, the contestants develop autonomous robots and software agents and take part in games, simulations, conferences, and educational programs, but RoboCup is not just about playing games, explains Visser, who is one of the Trustees of the RoboCup Federation. »

We learned in science class that light beams travel in straight lines and spread through a process known as diffraction -- and they can't go around corners. But now researchers at Tel Aviv University are investigating new applications for their recent discovery that small beams of light can indeed be bent in a laboratory setting, diffracting much less than a "regular" beam.These rays, called "Airy beams," were named after English astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy, who studied the parabolic trajectories of light in rainbows, and were first created at the University of Central Florida. Now, the fortuitously-named Prof. Ady Arie and his graduate students Tal Ellenbogen, Noa Voloch-Bloch, Ayelet Ganany-Padowicz and Ido Dolev of Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Engineering have demonstrated new ways to generate and control Airy beams. Employing new algorithms and special nonlinear optical crystals, their research is reported in a recent issue of the scientific journal Nature Photonics.Some of these new applications, such as a light source to generate beams that can turn around corners, or lighted spaces that contain no apparent light source, are still five or ten years away, says Prof. Arie. But his research has immediate applications as well. For example, because small particles are attracted to the highest intensities of a beam, the pharmaceutical and chemical industries can use the new beam to sort molecules according to size or quality, filtering impurities from drug formulations that might otherwise lead to toxicity and death. »

Analyzing nearly 20 terabytes of data collected from 220 mission flight-hours covering more than half of Afghanistan, Naval Research Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey investigators reveal several potential major oil and gas sedimentary basins, mineral-rich regions, and hydrologic resources for agriculture and economic development as recently reported by Department of Defense.Flights administered by Naval Research Laboratory Scientific Development Squadron One (VXS-1) were flown using NP-3D Orion turboprop aircraft specially equipped with a suite of unique state of the art remote sensing technology that included dual gravimeters, scalar and vector magnetometers, a digital photogrammetric camera, hyperspectral imager and an L-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar.Photogrammetric mosaics and other imagery processed by USGS have also been provided to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for incorporation into Department of Defense image libraries and are being used for economic analysis projects by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for construction and development projects and to the government of Afghanistan for a myriad of uses to include geologic exploration, hydrologic resource management and earthquake hazard analysis."This imagery will be enormously important for seismic and flood hazard analysis, development of roads, pipelines and property boundaries, and other civil infrastructure projects and agriculture resource management," states NRL Chief Scientist, Dr. John Brozena. "The data we have amassed and are analyzing today could prove invaluable to the future economic redevelopment of Afghanistan," added Brozena. »

For several thousands of years, ancient Egypt dominated the Mediterranean world -- and scholars across the globe have spent more than a century trying to document the reigns of the various rulers of Egypt's Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. Now, a detailed radiocarbon analysis of short-lived plant remains from the region is providing scientists with a long and accurate chronology of ancient Egyptian dynasties that agrees with most previous estimates but also imposes some historic revisions.Although previous chronologies have been precise in relative ways, assigning absolute dates to specific events in ancient Egyptian history has been an extremely contentious undertaking. This new study tightly constrains those previous predictions, especially for the Old Kingdom, which was determined to be slightly older than some scholars had believed. The study will also allow for more accurate historical comparisons to surrounding areas, like Libya and Sudan, which have been subject to many radiocarbon dating techniques in the past.Christopher Bronk Ramsey and colleagues from the Universities of Oxford and Cranfield in England, along with a team of researchers from France, Austria and Israel, collected radiocarbon measurements from 211 various plants -- obtained from museum collections in the form of seeds, baskets, textiles, plant stems and fruits -- that were directly associated with particular reigns of ancient Egyptian kings. They then combined their radiocarbon data with historical information about the order and length of each king's reign to make a complete chronology of ancient Egyptian dynasties.Their research is published in the June 18 issue of Science, the peer-reviewed journal published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society."My colleague, Joanne Rowland, went to a lot of museums, explaining what we were doing and asking for their participation," Bronk Ramsey said. "The museums were all very helpful in providing material we were interested in -- especially important since export of samples from Egypt is currently prohibited. Fortunately, we only needed samples that were about the same size as a grain of wheat." »

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/) researchers want to develop solar cells with an efficiency of over 65 percent by means of nanotechnology. In Southern Europe and North Africa these new solar cells can generate a substantial portion of the European demand for electricity. The Dutch government reserves EUR 1.2 million for the research.The current thin-film solar cells (type III/V) have an efficiency that lies around 40 percent, but they are very expensive and can only be applied as solar panels on satellites. By using mirror systems that focus one thousand times they can now also be deployed on earth in a cost-effective manner. The TU/ researchers expect that in ten years their nano-structured solar cells can attain an efficiency of more than 65 percent. Jos Haverkort: "If the Netherlands wants to timely participate in a commercial exploitation of nanowire solar cells, there is a great urgency to get on board now." The research is conducted together with Philips MiPlaza.They think that nanotechnology, in combination with the use of concentrated sunlight through mirror systems, has the potential to lead to the world's most efficient solar cell system with a cost price lower than 50 cent per Watt peak. In comparison: for the present generation of solar cells that cost price is 1.50 euro per Watt peak. »

Scientists have just come several steps closer to understanding change blindness -- the well studied failure of humans to detect seemingly obvious changes to scenes around them -- with new research that used a computer-based model to predict what types of changes people are more likely to notice.These findings on change blindness were presented in the Journal of Vision."This is one of the first applications of computer intelligence to help study human visual intelligence, " said author Peter McOwan, professor at Queen Mary, University of London. "The biologically inspired mathematics we have developed and tested can have future uses in letting computer vision systems such as robots detect interesting elements in their visual environment."During the study, participants were asked to spot the differences between pre-change and post-change versions of a series of pictures. Some of these pictures had elements added, removed or color altered, with the location of the change based on attention grabbing properties (this is the "salience" level referred to in the article).Unlike previous research where scientists studied change blindness by manually manipulating such pictures and making decisions about what and where to make a change, the computer model used in this study eliminated any human bias. The research team at Queen Mary's School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science developed an algorithm that let the computer "decide" how to change the images that study participants were asked to view. »

Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Facultad de Informática have developed a system to forecast the evolution of the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano.The system is based on an estimate of the volcano's daily emissions gathered using OMI, GOME-2 and SCIAMACHY satellite observations, and is available for consultation over the Internet free of charge. These emissions vary on a daily basis, although, for forecasting purposes, the emissions observed on the satellites are assumed to be constant during the forecasting or model simulation period. This is the biggest source of uncertainty, as it is not known exactly how the volcano's emissions will evolve in the future.The system combines information on the volcano's behaviour, gathered twice a day from the above satellites, with environmental information, like wind speed and direction, air humidity, etc., that influences the evolution of the volcanic ash cloud.The system was developed based on a European-wide air quality forecasting system, also built at the Facultad de Informática. This system has been operational since 2008 and is based on MM5 (NCAR, US) and CMAQ (US EPA) models. For this new undertaking, satellite-gathered information on the emissions from the volcano has been added to the model. »

A team of businesses and researchers in Serbia and Slovenia, with support from the Eureka Network, has developed a heat pump technology which makes use of ground source heat as a climate-friendly, cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels. The forces of nature that exist underground are no secret, given what we have seen from the recent volcanic eruptions. The exploitation of this geothermal energy source had been underdeveloped until recently. Now, thanks to Nafta Geoterm and the University of Maribor, both based in Slovenia, Serbian business partner Klima and its parent company Mayekawa in Belgium, an alternative means of heating ground water has been developed so that this largely neglected heat source may be used for space heating to remarkable effect. A deep geothermal well supplies the town of Lendava, Slovenia with water for heating various types of buildings. The water temperature of 70°C falls to 50°C once used - this is not warm enough to be re-used for space heating yet is too warm to be put back into the well. It was evident that better use of this water made ecological sense. Professor Darko Goricanec from the University of Maribor proposed a solution which was to come up with a high-temperature heat pump that can reheat geothermal source water from 40°C to 80°C - hot enough to be reused for space heating. Heat pumps previously available on the market fell short, since none could reheat the water to up to 90°C, the required temperature for the type of heating system commonly used in Europe's older housing - that being, high-temperature radiators designed to run from fossil fuel-fired boilers.  »