About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes David Pimentel, Cornell professor of ecology and agricultural sciences.

Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.

Pimentel and a team of Cornell graduate students examined data from more than 120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases.

Do the overall efficiencies of renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and geothermal add up in terms of their complete life cycle from materials sourcing, manufacture, running, and decommissioning? Researchers in Greece have carried out a life cycle assessment to find the answer.

Increasing energy consumption and a growing world population implies shrinking reserves of fossil fuels. While the use of fossil fuels brings with it the problem of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. Continued dependence on fossil fuels coupled with the pressing global issue of climate change has pushed the concept of renewable energy sources to the top of the agenda.

A recent Newsweek magazine cover story on global warming contained significant errors and used outdated scientific material in its representation of global climate data collected by satellites, according to the scientists who maintain that dataset at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer, who created and maintain the global temperature dataset, recently addressed how instruments aboard NOAA satellites collect temperature data and about the accuracy of that data.

If you’re among the creatures that produce scads of genetically identical offspring – like microbes, plants or water fleas - you have a good evolutionary strategy, a new study says.

These creatures provide a chance to wonder about the clones raised in near-identical environments that turn out differently than their kin. In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Michigan State University zoologist and others report how the greater good of a genetic pool of identical organisms is affected when a few individuals break from the developmental pack.

Men really only think about women, it seems, even to the point of evolving to be more attractive to them.

Men with large jaws, flaring cheeks and large eyebrows are sexy, at least in the eyes of our ancestors, researchers at the Natural History Museum have discovered. Facial attractiveness played a major role in shaping human evolution, as studies on our fossil ancestors have shown our choice of sexual partner has shaped the human face.

Dr Eleanor Weston, palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum said, ‘The evolution of facial appearance is central to understanding what makes men and women attractive to each other.

Did a group of Indian scholars out-math Newton hundreds of years before he was born?

Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the ‘Kerala School’ in India identified the ‘infinite series’- one of the founding principles of modern mathematics and a basic component of calculus - in about 1350.

Circumstantial evidence listed by Gheverghese also says that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century and that knowledge may have been passed on to Sir Isaac later.

The discovery is attributed ( wrongly, says Gheverghese ) to Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries.

The team from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal the Kerala

The plant growth hormone auxin is controlled by circadian rhythms within the plant, UC Davis researchers have found. The discovery explains how plants can time their growth to take advantage of resources such as light and water, and suggests that many other processes may be influenced by circadian rhythms.

Auxin tells shoots to grow away from the ground and toward light and water. Charles Darwin conducted early experiments that showed how auxin affects plant growth. Most plants and animals have an internal clock that allows them to match their activities to the time of day or season of the year.

Italians, Irish and European Jews were all once considered 'non-white' by the standards of their day but that's hardly the case now - and certainly not the case with the descendants of those immigrants.

But a new study on Latino immigrants finds that, in contrast to past generations of European immigrants, a significant share of second-and-third-generation Latino-Americans still identify with a Latino racial category.

Joseph Michael, a UC doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and a researcher at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and Jeffrey Timberlake, University of Cincinnati assistant professor of sociology, are examining how the immigration of Latinos to the United States compares to the earlier European immigration waves of white ethnic

Enthusiastic observers were rewarded by a nice display of the Perseid meteor shower that was visible at its best in the night between 12 and 13 August 2007. We present glimpses of the spectacle and the scientific rewards of staying up all night.

The comet Swift-Tuttle orbits the Sun with a period of about 130 years. Whenever the comet comes close to the Sun in its orbit, it ejects a stream of dust particles, which are then distributed along its orbit. When the Earth passes through their path - a regular occurrence every August - we see a meteor shower, a fabulous spectacle for viewers on Earth.

Quinn Norton, a San Francisco journalist, had a tiny magnet implanted in her finger, which enabled her to detect electrical fields.

Bits of my laptop became familiar as tingles and buzzes. Every so often I would pass near something and get an unexpected vibration. Live phone pairs on the sides of houses sometimes startled me.

You might think of self-experimentation as a modern version of “know thyself” but this is “know the rest of the world”.