It has slowly dawned on climate researchers that promoting the belief that curbing CO2 will prevent climate change has been a bad idea. American and European CO2 emissions have gone down, for example, but Asia's has risen, and we went beyond the 'point of no return' and not much has changed.

It was once the case that any mention of other climate-forcing gases got vitriol and hostile emails but now it is recognized that soot particles also contribute to global warming, along with methane. They just disappear quickly from the atmosphere. Short-lived climate pollutants (also known as Short Lived Climate Forcers - SLCF) also include sulfur dioxide, and to a much lesser extent fluorocarbons, but can have a measurable impact on the climate.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft visited the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and it showed that deep grooves circling the asteroid's equator were probably caused by a massive impact on Vesta's south pole.

A super high-speed cannon at NASA's Ames Research Center has shed new light on the violent chain of events deep in Vesta's interior that formed those surface grooves, some of which are wider than the Grand Canyon.

"Vesta got hammered," said Peter Schultz, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown and the paper's senior author. "The whole interior was reverberating, and what we see on the surface is the manifestation of what happened in the interior."

Over 51 percent participants in the Liverpool Stop Smoking Service have tried electronic cigarettes and almost 46 percent are currently using them.

Two photons in free space do not interact. Light waves can pass through each other without having any influence on each other at all. For many applications in quantum technology, however, interaction between photons is crucial. It is an indispensable prerequisite for transmitting information through tap-proof quantum channels or for building optical logic gates. At the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), scientists have now succeeded in establishing a strong interaction between two single photons. This opens up completely new possibilities for quantum optics. The experimental results have now been published in the journal "Nature Photonics".

The microbes living in people's guts are much less diverse than those in humans' closest relatives, the African apes. What does that mean? No one knows, but the microbiome is all the latest rage in marketing, with probiotics advertised on television and a segment of the research community rushing to create studies to capitalize on that.

Abortion has been federal law in America for over 40 years, yet every election cycle politicians in Democratic Congressional districts campaign on the issue - and sociologists write about this common medical procedure. How common? So common it happens more often than miscarriages, according to a new paper.

Surveys are not telling us much new at this point but a sociologist writing in Sociological Science analyzes a survey and finds that anti-abortion people are less likely to hear about the abortions women they know have had than are pro-abortion Americans.