Over past centuries, the crews of ships regularly measured some basic properties of the waters through which they sailed, such as temperature and salinity. 

Though their accuracy has to be questionable, these historical observations have proven to be important for climate modelers who are trying to validate their work. In recent years, the importance of the deep ocean as a sink for the extra energy trapped by anthropogenic climate change has come to the fore. 

How much money would you be willing to spend to find out if supersymmetry - SUSY - is real or not?

It was always known that discoveries made by the Large Hadron Collider would require the International Linear Collider to interpret whatever the LHC finds. With the Higgs boson discovered, physicists want to look ahead to the development of the ILC, an electron-positron collider designed to measure in detail all the properties of the newly discovered Higgs particle.

The Qinling-Dabie orogenic complex, part of a large east-west mountain range in the heart of China, plays a key role in helping scientists understand the formation and breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia, according to a new paper. 

A recent increase in polar mesospheric clouds - diffuse collections of water ice crystals in the mesosphere near the poles at altitudes of about 50 miles - could be due to a recent increase in space traffic, a new paper in Geophysical Research Letterssuggests. 

The number and brightness of polar mesospheric ice clouds is expected to decrease when the incoming flux of solar ultraviolet radiation increases. Increases in solar radiation both heat and dry out the atmosphere slightly, leading to a decrease in ice cloud formation.