Methane is a greenhouse gas with more warming impact than carbon dioxide but also fortunately a much shorter life in the atmosphere.

Due to the popularity of much cleaner natural gas, which has caused CO2 emissions to drop, there are concerns about methane but the big source is nature herself - decomposition of organic material, a complex process involving bacteria and microbes, is a big culprit.

When a heart attack strikes, the effects are lingering: heart muscle cells die and scar tissue forms, which makes future heart failure more likely.

Since we have been hearing about quantum computing for decades with no real applied breakthroughs, it may be necessary to use technology available now to edge close to computers that act like brains.

A team wants to create the functionality of a network of neurons using  memory resistors - memristors - which are resistors in a circuit that "remember" how much current has flowed through them.

Adolescent obesity is a national public health concern and, unchecked, places young people on a trajectory for a variety of health issues as they grow older. A new study from the University of Houston Department of Health and Human Performance (HHP) and Texas Obesity Research Center (TORC) suggests there is a relationship between long-term exposure to three specific types of family stressors and children becoming obese by the time they turn 18 years old.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, Assistant Professor Daphne Hernandez examined three family stress points ¬- family disruption, financial stress and maternal poor health - and applied those to data of more than 4,700 adolescents born between 1975 and 1990.

An unusual and very exciting form of carbon - that can be created by drawing on paper- looks to hold the key to real-time, high throughput DNA sequencing, a technique that would revolutionize medical research and testing. Led by Dr Jiri Cervenka and PhD candidate Nikolai Dontschuk from the University of Melbourne, the study also included scientists from the Australian Synchrotron and La Trobe University and is published in Nature Communications.

The Australian researchers have shown that graphene- a one-atom thick sheet of hexagonally arranged carbon, shaped like chicken wire - can detect the four nucleobases that make up DNA (cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine).

Nutrition and metabolism are closely linked with reproductive health. Several reproductive disorders including polycystic ovary syndrome, amenorrhea, and ovarian cancer have been linked to malnutrition, diabetes, and obesity. Furthermore, fasting in numerous species can result in decreased fertility, because the development of immature egg cells, called oocytes, is arrested. Understanding how nutrients accumulate in immature oocytes will provide valuable insights into the link between metabolic disease and reproductive dysfunction.