Press Releases - 2010-2011

Scientists, including Carnegie's Anna Michalak, have developed a new, integrated, ten-year science plan to better understand the details of Earth’s carbon cycle. It identifies new research areas such as the role of humans as agents and managers of carbon cycling and climate change, the direct impact of greenhouse gases on ecosystems including changes to plant and animal diversity and ocean acidification, the need to address social concerns, and how best to communicate results to the public and decision makers.

It is difficult to measure accurately each nation’s contribution of carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon is extracted out of the ground as coal, gas, and oil, and these fuels are often exported to other countries where they are burned to generate the energy that is used to make products. In turn, these products may be traded to still other countries where they are consumed. A team led by Carnegie’s Steven Davis, and including Ken Caldeira, tracked and quantified this supply chain of global carbon dioxide emissions

Scientists have speculated that Earth’s carbon cycle extends into the deep Earth, but until now there has been no direct evidence. Researchers analyzed diamonds that originated from the lower mantle and erupted to the surface. Analysis shows compositions consistent with the mineralogy of oceanic crust. This finding is the first direct evidence that slabs of oceanic crust sank into the lower mantle and that material, including carbon, is cycled between Earth’s surface and deep interior.

The MESSENGER spacecraft has shown scientists that Mercury doesn’t conform to theory. Its surface material composition differs from both those of the other terrestrial planets and expectations prior to the MESSENGER mission, calling into question current theories for Mercury’s formation. Its magnetic field is unlike any other in the Solar System, and there are huge expanses of volcanic plains surrounding the north polar region of the planet and cover more than 6% of Mercury’s surface.

Carbon is the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe and takes on a wide variety of forms, called allotropes, including diamond and graphite. Scientists at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory are part of a team that has discovered a new form of carbon, which is capable of withstanding extreme pressure stresses that were previously observed only in diamond.

Our genetic blueprint contains numerous entities known as transposons, which have the ability to move from place to place on the chromosomes within a cell. An astounding 50% of human DNA comprises both active transposon elements and the decaying remains of former transposons. Every time a plant or animal cell prepares to divide, the chromosome regions richest in transposon-derived sequences are among the last to duplicate. New research provides potential insight into both these enigmas.

A planet with two suns may be a familiar sight to fans of the Star Wars film series, but not, until now, to scientists. A team of researchers, including Carnegie’s Alan Boss, has discovered a planet that orbits around a pair of stars. This is the first instance of astronomers finding direct evidence of a so-called circumbinary planet. A few other planets have been suspected of orbiting around both members of a dual-star system, but the transits of the circumbinary planet have never been detected previously.

A team of scientists, led by Michael Rauch from the Carnegie Observatories, has discovered a distant galaxy that may help elucidate two fundamental questions of galaxy formation: How galaxies take in matter and how they give off energetic radiation.

Scientists have long debated about the impact on global climate of water evaporated from vegetation. New research from Carnegie’s Global Ecology department concludes that evaporated water helps cool the earth as a whole, not just the local area of evaporation, demonstrating that evaporation of water from trees and lakes could have a cooling effect on the entire atmosphere. These findings have major implications for land-use decision making.

Plant biologists have been working for years to nail down the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell’s nucleus. New research has isolated another link in this chain. Fully understanding the brassinosteroid pathway could help scientists better understand plant growth and help improve food and energy crop production.

Earth’s Moon could be younger than previously thought, according to new research. The prevailing theory of our Moon’s origin is that it was created by a giant impact between a large planet-like object and the proto-Earth. The energy of this impact was sufficiently high that the Moon formed from melted material that was ejected into space. As the Moon cooled, this magma solidified into different mineral components. Analysis of lunar rock samples thought to have been derived from the original magma has given scientists a new estimate of the Moon’s age.

Meteorites hold a record of the chemicals that existed in the early Solar System and that may have been a crucial source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth. Since the 1960s, scientists have been trying to find proof that nucleobases, the building blocks of our genetic material, came to Earth on meteorites. New research indicates that certain nucleobases do reach the Earth from extraterrestrial sources, by way of certain meteorites, and in greater diversity and quantity than previously thought.

Type Ia supernovae are violent stellar explosions whose brightness is used to determine distances in the universe. Observing these objects to billions of light years away has led to the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, the foundation for the notion of dark energy. Although all Type Ia supernovae appear to be very similar, astronomers do not know for certain how the explosions take place and whether they all share the same origin. Now, researchers have examined new and detailed observations of 41 of these objects and concluded that there are clear signatures of gas outflows from the supernova ancestors, which do not appear to be white dwarfs

Geological history has periodically featured giant lava eruptions that coat large swaths of land or ocean floor with basaltic lava, which hardens into rock formations called flood basalt. New research proposes that the remnants of six of the largest volcanic events of the past 250 million years contain traces of the ancient Earth's primitive mantle—which existed before the largely differentiated mantle of today—offering clues to the geochemical history of the planet.

New research from a team including several Carnegie scientists demonstrates that a specific small segment of RNA could play a key role in the growth of a type of malignant childhood eye tumor called retinoblastoma. The tumor is associated with mutations of a protein called Rb, or retinoblastoma protein. Dysfunctional Rb is also involved with other types of cancers, including lung, brain, breast and bone. Their work could result in a new therapeutic target for treating this rare form of cancer and potentially other cancers as well.

Water really is everywhere. A team of astronomers have found the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe—discovered in the central regions of a distant quasar. Quasars contain massive black holes that are steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. The energy from this particular quasar was released some 12 billion years ago, only 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang and long before most of the stars in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy began forming.

Jewelers abhor diamond impurities, but they are a bonanza for scientists. Safely encased in the super-hard diamond, impurities are unaltered, ancient minerals that can tell the story of Earth’s distant past. Carnegie's Steve Shirey analyzed data from the literature of over 4,000 of these mineral inclusions to find that continents started the cycle of breaking apart, drifting, and colliding about 3 billion years ago.

Glasses differ from crystals. Crystals are organized in repeating patterns that extend in every direction. Glasses lack this strict organization, but do sometimes demonstrate order among neighboring atoms. New research from Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory reveals the possibility of creating a metallic glass that is organized on a larger scale.

In March, the MESSENGER spacecraft entered orbit around Mercury to become that planet’s first orbiter. The tiny craft is providing a wealth of new information and some surprises. For instance, Mercury’s surface composition differs from that expected for the innermost of the terrestrial planets, and Mercury’s magnetic field has a north-south asymmetry that affects the interaction of the surface with charged particles from the solar wind.

Although scientists have been able to sequence the genomes of many organisms, they still lack a context for associating the proteins encoded in genes with specific biological processes. To better understand the genetics underlying plant physiology and ecology—especially in regard to photosynthesis—a team of researchers including Carnegie's Arthur Grossman identified a list of proteins encoded in the genomes of plants and green algae, but not in the genomes of organisms that don't generate energy through photosynthesis.

Decisions by farmers to plant on productive land with little snow enhances the potential for reforestation to counteract global warming, concludes new research from Carnegie’s Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira. Previous research has led scientists and politicians to believe that regrowing forests on Northern lands that were cleared in order to grow crops would not decrease global warming. But these studies did not consider the importance of the choices made by farmers in the historical past.

Carbonaceous chondrites are a type of organic-rich meteorite that contain samples of the materials that took part in the creation of our planets nearly 4.6 billion years ago, including materials that were likely formed before our Solar System was created and may have been crucial to the formation of life on Earth. The complex suite of organic materials found in carbonaceous chondrites can vary substantially from meteorite to meteorite. New research from Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and Geophysical Laboratory shows that most of these variations are the result of hydrothermal activity that took place within a few million years of the formation of the Solar System, when the meteorites were still part of larger parent bodies, likely asteroids.

Scientists have long debated about the origin of carbon in Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks and how it might signal the remnants of the earliest forms of life on the planet. New research by a team including five scientists from Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory and Department of Terrestrial Magnetism discovered that carbon samples taken from ancient Canadian rock formations are younger than the sedimentary rocks surrounding them, which were formed at least 3.8 billion years ago. Their results indicate that the carbon contained in such ancient rocks should not be assumed to be as old as the rocks, unless it can be shown to have had the same metamorphic history as the host rock

Accurately calculating the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the process of producing and bringing products to our doorsteps is nearly impossible, but still a worthwhile effort, two Carnegie researchers claim in a commentary published online this week. The Global Ecology department’s Ken Caldeira and Steven Davis commend the work of industrial ecologist Glen Peters and colleagues, published in the same journal late last month, and use that team’s data to do additional analysis on the disparity between emissions and consumption in different parts of the world.

Brazilians are world leaders in using biofuels. About a quarter of their automobile fuel consumption comes from sugarcane, which significantly reduces carbon dioxide emissions that otherwise would be emitted from using gasoline. Now Carnegie’s Scott Loari and team have found that sugarcane has a double benefit. Expansion of the crop in areas previously occupied by other crops cools the local climate by reflecting sunlight back into space and by lowering the air temperature as the plants “exhale” cooler water.

Climate change from black carbon depends on altitude Scientists have known for decades that black carbon aerosols add to global warming. These airborne particles made of sooty carbon are believed to be among the largest man-made contributors to global warming because they absorb solar radiation and heat the atmosphere. New research from Carnegie’s Long Cao and Ken Caldeira, with colleagues, quantifies how black carbon’s impact on climate depends on its altitude in the atmosphere.

Although its name may make many people think of flowers, the element germanium is part of a frequently studied group of elements, called IVa, which could have applications for next-generation computer architecture as well as implications for fundamental condensed matter physics. New research reveals details of the element’s transitions under pressure. Their results show extraordinary agreement with the predictions of modern condensed matter theory.