Our planet has reached extreme weather conditions. Recently , a tornado in the US killed 519 people. Floods in Asia and Australia killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. Korea had its heaviest snowfall in recorded history. My heart goes out to all the families of the victims of the recent serious disasters. These events have been shaped by global warming. Scientists have...

Rapid advances in hyperspectral technologies have led to new sensors, which greatly improve our ability to gather information about distant objects without direct physical contact. While many of these sensors and technologies were designed for environmental monitoring and earth science, they may have important uses for security application and humanitarian aid missions. As the number and capabi...

In single-bubble sonoluminescence, repeated brief flashes of light are produced in a gas bubble strongly driven by a periodic acoustic field. A startling hypothesis has been made by Lohse and co-workers [Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1359 (1997)] that the non-noble gases in an air bubble undergo chemical reaction into soluble products, leaving only argon. In the present work, this dissociation hypothesi...

We describe the isolation and spectroscopic characterization of the heavier phosphorus-containing analogue of isocyanic acid (HPCO), and its isotopologue (DPCO). This fundamental small molecule, which has been postulated to exist in interstellar space, has thus far only been observed at low gas phase concentrations or in inert gas matrices. In this report we describe its synthesis, spectroscopi...

A noble-gas atom that is polarized by spin-exchange with optically pumped alkali atoms can be made to coherently oscillate by driving the NMR resonance with an oscillating field that is phase-locked to the transverse component of the detected oscillation. Using the alkali atoms as the magnetometer for the NMR detection allows an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio for detection of magnetic fie...

Diffusible gasses and small molecule transmitters are classes of compounds used by neurons and other cell types for local and hormonal signaling. In crustaceans, there is evidence for the neuronal production of the gasses nitric oxide (NO) and carbon monoxide (CO), as well as the small molecule transmitters acetylcholine, glutamate and GABA. While much is known about the physiological roles pla...