Early on a winter morning in 2011, residents of western Norway who lived or worked along the shores of the nation's fjords were startled to see the calm morning waters suddenly begin to rise and fall.

Starting at around 7:15 local time and continuing for nearly 3 hours, waves up to 5 feet high surged through the previously still fjord waters. The scene was captured by security cameras and by people with cell phones, reported to local media, and investigated by a local newspaper.

Drawing on this footage, and using a computational model and observations from a nearby seismic station, Bondevik et al. identify the cause of the waves - the devastating magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake that hit off the coast of Japan half an hour earlier.

Cosmic rays, high-energy particles, can damage electronics on Earth, as well as human and non-human DNA, which puts astronauts in space at risk but has also caused any number of genetic modifications in plants that are considered completely natural.  

Their origin has confounded scientists for decades. A study using data  collected by IceTop at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, reveals new information that may help unravel the longstanding mystery of exactly how and where these "rays", because the more scientists learn about the energy spectrum and chemical composition of cosmic rays, the closer humanity will come to uncovering where these energetic particles originate. 

How do you find a new element, like the recently discovered superheavy chemical element 115?

Elements beyond atomic number 104 are referred to as superheavy elements and are produced at accelerator laboratories and generally decay after a short time. Initial reports about an element with atomic number 115 were released from a research center in Russia in 2004 but their indirect evidence was insufficient for an official discovery.

The search for clean, green sustainable energy sources marches on. While some studies note that solar and wind energy could be viable by 2025, if they could bypass environmental lawsuits, hydrogen and nuclear are rushing to fill the gaps.

Thanks to a friend and follower of this blog, which I will not name for once to protect him from your flaming, I can share today with you one of the best instances of involuntary humor in particle physics graphs I have ever seen in my whole life.

The graph appears to be genuine, so this is a good candidate for the IgNobel prize IMHO.

A group of gamma-aminobutyric acid
(GABA) neurons, the neurotransmitters which inhibit other cells, shown to contribute to symptoms like social withdrawal and increased anxiety, may lead to  a new drug target for depression and other mood disorders.  

It is known that people suffering from depression and other mood disorders often react to rejection or bullying by withdrawing themselves socially more than the average person who takes it in strides, yet the biological processes behind these responses have remained unclear.

Data collected from 2009 through 2012 by NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science campaign that studies polar ice, reveals evidence of a large and previously unknown canyon hidden under a mile of Greenland ice.

A long-standing mystery has been why most super massive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of galaxies have such a low accretion rate; they swallow very little of the cosmic gases available and instead act as if they are on a severe diet.

The signature X-ray emissions from super massive black holes, which come from an area much larger than the black holes themselves, are often so surprisingly faint that the objects are difficult to distinguish from their galaxy centers. There has been a big mystery about why most of these black hole signals are so faint.

Friends don't sue each other, right?

So it would seem to be a bad idea for animal rights groups to sue the EPA because the EPA is going to not do something they never started doing anyway. Activists need the EPA to enforce their goals, they have no authority without the EPA or various other federal laws and bodies to oversee laws that highly-paid lobbyists convince lawmakers to pass.

While it might lead to hurt feelings if you and I sued each other, for activist groups and the government, it is not only smart strategy, they sometimes plan it together in advance. Why? Once a lawsuit is filed, the EPA can 'settle' - since the EPA is an appointed body outside lawmakers and the public, as long as the White House does not object to their settlement, it will be fine.

By analyzing a 150-year-old moss bank on the Antarctic Peninsula, researchers describe an unprecedented rate of ecological change since the 1960s, driven by warming temperatures. 

The researchers looked to the Antarctic Peninsula because it is one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth; annual temperatures there have increased by up to 0.56°C per decade since the 1950s. There they found a moss bank that has been slowly growing at the top surface and accumulating peat material since it first established in about 1860. By analyzing core samples of that moss bank, they were able to characterize the growth and activity of the moss and microbes over time.