Articles by David Appell
Phys.org / India faces rising uncompensable heat stress, especially during monsoon season
Animals struggle to cool down in extreme heat and high humidity, and heat stress is rising in many regions around the world. This is especially true for people in tropical countries, including populous India. In a new paper ...
Phys.org / The impact of recent super El Niños on sea level rise
El Niños and La Niñas are the third-most dominant influences on Earth's climate, after the sun and the greenhouse effect. But they haven't been easy to decipher or to predict in terms of when they will happen and what exact ...
Phys.org / Natural born killers—tracking immune cells as they cluster around cancer
There is a constant war going on in your body. Working against you are viruses and cancer cells growing uncontrollably, threatening your tissues and organs. Fighting on your side are immune cells such as lymphocytes, a type ...
Phys.org / Why nanoscale droplets don't coalesce and microscale droplets do
Olive oil and water do not naturally mix. Water molecules are polar, having a net electric dipole moment due to the bend angle of about 104.5° between the two oxygen-hydrogen bonds. Olive oil is nonpolar due to its long hydrocarbon ...
Phys.org / How long can plants survive on Earth? New model suggests up to 2 billion more years
Vegetarians need not worry yet—plants will be on Earth for a long time to come. But not forever. The sun will ultimately determine the long-term existence of life on Earth. Its total energy output, called luminosity, has ...
Phys.org / Could Earth have sent life to Jupiter's moon Europa?
Could Earth have seeded Jupiter's moon Europa with bacterial life, where it could have taken hold in Europa's ocean and perhaps evolved into something more? That's the hypothesis of a new paper in the International Journal ...
Phys.org / Evidence of cosmic-ray acceleration from a nearby supernova remnant
Cosmic rays seen at Earth show a wide range of particle energies, from 107 electron-volts (eV) to more than 1020 eV, the latter being about the same as the kinetic energy of a 450 gram football (soccer ball) being kicked ...
Phys.org / Bare supercontinent may have tipped ancient Earth into 'Snowball' phase
About a billion years ago, Earth started to come into its own. It was past the awkwardness of its younger years full of growing pains and turmoil: comet strikes and slimy water, including the Great Oxidation Event that flipped ...
Phys.org / A better way to search for extraterrestrial intelligence
When you're looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, it helps to know what you're looking for and to go about it in the most efficient way. But work so far has generally not done so, writes Benjamin Zuckerman, ...
Phys.org / Sudden quantum jolts may not break adiabatic behavior after all
In thermodynamics, an "adiabatic process" is a system change that transfers no heat in or out of the system. Any and all energy change in that system are therefore accomplished by doing work on the system, work being action ...
Phys.org / An anomaly in global sea level rise is explained by deep ocean heating
Climate scientists like to keep their accounting books neat and balanced. As climate change alters energy flows all across the planet, which in turn causes effects like sea level rise, ice melt and more, keeping close track ...
Phys.org / Terraforming Mars: Modeling engineered aerosols to warm the planet
Whenever humans arrive on Mars, they're going to find it a difficult place to exist. Mars is cold, with an average surface temperature of -55°C; temperatures can plunge to -125°C with dust storms lasting months; its atmosphere ...
Phys.org / How systems science helps keep my flower delivery costs low
When you go out to run errands on the weekend, you're on a "tour" as defined by human mobility researchers. Same if you book a guided tour of a famous city or take a trip on a cruise boat that reaches multiple ports. A characteristic ...
Phys.org / A new scientific discipline to ensure humanity's deep future
Will humanity extend into the far future? It's likely many of us think it should. The problem is that each of us, individually and collectively, act otherwise—we are destroying the environment and climate at every turn. Now ...
Phys.org / A new, useful absorption limit for ultra-thin films
Ultrathin, conductive films such as those made of graphene are widely used in modern optoelectronic devices, but it has been thought that their efficacy is fundamentally limited: they can absorb at most half of the incident ...
