ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

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• Record efficiency for next-generation solar cells
• Researchers analyze melting glaciers and water resources in Central Asia
• New discovery of how carbon is stored in the Southern Ocean
• Magnetic field, mantle convection and tectonics
• Chronic 2000-04 drought, worst in 800 years, may be the 'new normal'
• Smell the Potassium: New understanding of trigger for compulsive mating and male-on-male death matches

Record efficiency for next-generation solar cells Posted: 29 Jul 2012 11:23 AM PDT Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of colloidal quantum dot (CQD) films, leading to the most efficient CQD solar cell ever. The researchers created a solar cell out of inexpensive materials that was certified at a world-record 7.0 percent efficiency.

Researchers analyze melting glaciers and water resources in Central Asia Posted: 29 Jul 2012 11:23 AM PDT Scientists have analyzed climate changes and glaciation in the Tien Shan Mountains (Central Asia), and explained their consequences.

New discovery of how carbon is stored in the Southern Ocean Posted: 29 Jul 2012 11:22 AM PDT Scientists have discovered an important method of how carbon is drawn down from the surface of the Southern Ocean to the deep waters beneath. The Southern Ocean is an important carbon sink in the world – around 40 percent of the annual global CO2 emissions absorbed by the world's oceans enter through this region.

Magnetic field, mantle convection and tectonics Posted: 29 Jul 2012 11:21 AM PDT On a time scale of tens to hundreds of millions of years, the geomagnetic field may be influenced by currents in the mantle. The frequent polarity reversals of Earth's magnetic field can also be connected with processes in the mantle. New results show how the rapid processes in the outer core, which flows at rates of up to about one millimeter per second, are coupled with the processes in the mantle, which occur more in the velocity range of centimeters per year.

Chronic 2000-04 drought, worst in 800 years, may be the 'new normal' Posted: 29 Jul 2012 11:21 AM PDT The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years, but those conditions will become the "new normal" for most of the coming century, scientists conclude in a new report. Such climatic extremes, they say, have increased as a result of global warming.

Smell the Potassium: New understanding of trigger for compulsive mating and male-on-male death matches Posted: 29 Jul 2012 11:21 AM PDT Scientists have made a surprising find in study of sex- and aggression-triggering vomeronasal organ.

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