Each year, the biosphere balances its atmospheric budget: The carbon dioxide absorbed by plants in the spring and summer as they convert solar energy into food is released back to the atmosphere in autumn and winter. Levels of the greenhouse gas fall and rise with growth and harvesting.

Iowa corn farmers have a lot of clout during the political cycle in America. Former US Vice-President Al Gore even sided with environmentalists and embraced ethanol - which all of science said was a bad idea - and later acknowledged it was just to appeal to Iowa. They help pick presidents and now it turns out that their 2.2 billion bushels of corn are helping to save the planet too.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Tropical Storm Adjali on Nov. 19th at 9:05 UTC (1:05 A.M. Pacific) curving to the southwest on its trek through the Southern Indian Ocean.

The MODIS image showed that the storm began curving to the southwest, and despite slight weakening, thunderstorms circled around the low-level center.

In bean sprouts, a collection of amino acids called a protein complex allows them to grow longer in the darkness than in the light. In humans, there is a similar protein complex called CSN, and its subunit CSN6 is now believed to be a cancer-causing gene that impacts activity of another gene (Myc) tied to tumor growth.

The Lacey Act, introduced in 1900 by Republican Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa, was originally designed to stop illegal game across state borders but was then expanded, notably by President Ronald Reagan, to include illegal logging and breaking the laws of foreign governments.

The LHCb experiment collaborators at the Large Hadron Collider have announced discovery of two new particles in the baryon family.

The particles, known as the Xi_b'^- and Xi_b*^-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*⁰, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012.