Students who completed doctoral degrees in Earth and space sciences in 2001 entered a relatively strong job market, with most finding employment quickly with higher salaries, while remaining within their respective fields, according to a new report from the American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Geological Institute (AGI), and American Institute of Physics (AIP).
Rocks deposited by glaciers on mountain ranges in West Antarctica have given scientists the most direct evidence yet that parts of the ice sheet are on a long-term, natural trajectory of melting. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been melting and contributing water continuously to the ocean for the last 10,000 years and is likely to keep doing so, says John Stone, University of Washington associate professor of Earth and space sciences. Measuring and understanding changes in the Earth?s ice sheets over the past few decades, and predicting their future behavior are major challenges of modern glaciology. But it is important to view these changes in the context of what?s been happening naturally over centuries and millennia. This work establishes a background pattern of steady decline in the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Successfully predicting stock market swings is as futile as searching for the fountain of youth, some people believe. UCLA physicist and complex-systems theorist Didier Sornette is not among them. Sornette says he has found patterns that occur in market crashes dating back for centuries. Their statistical signatures are evident long in advance, he concludes. Sornette has developed algorithms ? based on sophisticated mathematics, statistical modeling techniques and collective behavior theory ? that enable him to analyze more than two dozen stock markets worldwide. Applying techniques of physics to economic data, he has developed a quantitative model that can predict the signatures of a coming stock market crash.