The hydrologic cycle on Earth comprises the transitions among the solid, liquid, and gaseous phases of water. Understanding the hydrologic cycle is of course important for climate science, but also for agricultural, drinking water, and disaster preparedness purposes. Improvements in satellite observations and general circulation models (GCMs) have led to...
Some studies using regional climate models (RCMs) suggest a weakening of the climatological rain-shadow along the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains during the western US cool-season. To identify the possible mechanisms of rain-shadow weakening under warming, a new set of 30-year, high-resolution (6 km) pseudo-global warming (PGW) simulations were analyzed...
Changes in glacier length reflect the integrated response to local fluctuations in temperature and precipitation, but when do such changes indicate forced climate change, and when do they indicate natural variability? In this study, we simulate the past ~1000 years of glacier length variability across the globe using the 3-stage...
As engineered nanomaterials (ENM) become more common in consumer products, it is crucial to rapidly assess toxicity of unique ENM. Previous studies rarely focused on standardizing nanotoxicity testing, leading to inconsistent and irreproducible results. This study characterized a variety of ENM of different size, shape, core type, and surface charge...
The North Pacific humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) population has been increasing at an average annual rate of ~6% since the early 1990s. In northern Southeast Alaska alone, there are now more whales than estimated for the entire North Pacific several decades ago. An understanding of how this growing population is...
A present abundance of biomass and a decreasing supply of petroleum signal the need for efficient pathways from renewable feedstocks to high value chemicals. One such class of chemicals is oleofurans, molecules comprised of a furan ring and carbon chain which can be used to make powerful hard water surfactants....
Distributed version control allows developers to manage software evolution among distributed development teams. But it does not eliminate all consistency and concurrency issues, and instead introduces additional complexity when merging code. And resolving merge conflicts is nontrivial when automated merging fails. In such cases, developers are forced to inspect the...
By 1900 domestication was a promising, if somewhat vexed, subject in biology. Volumes had been written about domestication, but little serious scientific inquiry was directed toward the phenomenon. Expertise lay with practical men, primarily breeders and fanciers. The bulk of scientific commentary on domestication came from anthropologists who derived theories...