is a Mashable series that answers provoking and salient questions about Earthâs warming climate. Â
Big snakes, alligators, giant tortoises, and flying lemurs thrived in a balmy Arctic some 50 million years ago. It was a time when the potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide had spiked in Earth s atmosphere, making the high polar regions downright tropical.Â
Scientists who investigate past climates, called paleoclimatologists, have collected bounties of evidence that CO2 has long been a dominant lever of Earth s temperature. The evidence exists in chemicals stored in fossils, which indicate how much CO2 once saturated the atmosphere. Now, paleoclimate researchers have published the most comprehensive history to date of Earth s past CO2, starting after the dinosaurs went extinct some 66 million years ago (likely from an asteroid impact). The research, showing the strongest link yet between past CO2 levels and global temperatures, was recently published in the scientific journa
Researchers develop computational tool to aid understanding of ORR on platinum catalysts in fuel cells
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are developing new computational tools and models to better understand and manage the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells. Hendrik Heinz, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, is leading the effort in partnership with the University of California Los Angeles. His team recently published new findings on the subject in an open-access paper in the journal
Science Advances.
Heinz said a key goal to making fuel cell vehicles viable is to find an effective catalyst in the fuel cell that can operate at near room temperature, with high efficiency and a long lifetime in acidic solution. Platinum metal is commonly used, but predicting the reactions and best materials to use for scaling up or different conditions has been a challenge to date.
Just before Thanksgiving last year, Melissa Milios Davis was contacted by Jerry Healey, the co-owner along with his wife, Ann Healey of Colorado Community Media, which publishes 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. The Healeys were approaching retirement and looking to sell, and they were hoping to avoid turning over…
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The human heart contracts about 70 times per minute, while that of a rat contracts over 300 times; what accounts for this difference? In a new study publishing 10th June in the open-access journal
PLOS Biology, led by Michael Geeves and Mark Wass of the University of Kent and Leslie Leinwand from the University of Colorado Boulder, reveal the molecular differences in the heart muscle protein beta myosin that underly the large difference in contraction velocity between the two species.
Myosin is a molecular motor - an intricate nanomachine that forms the dynamic core of a muscle s contractile machinery, burning cellular chemical energy in the form of ATP to rapidly and reversibly exert force against cables of actin. In so doing, it pulls the ends of the muscle cell closer together, causing muscle contraction. It has long been known that the maximal rate of contraction, called V0, varies predictably among mammals: In small mammals with their high metabolic rate, V0 is hi