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Leaves store carbon. In the spring, leaves soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, converting the gas into organic carbon compounds, and then in the autumn, trees shed those leaves, which decompose in the soil as they are eaten by microbes. Over time, decaying leaves release carbon back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

The Greenland ice sheet has a tale to tell about ancient greenhouse gas emissions too. Researchers have determined how much methane originates from natural sources and how much is due to human activity, from Roman times to the present.Methane is an underestimated greenhouse gas, 23X the impact of CO2 but not as long-lived, and like CO2 it has natural sources and also originates from human activities. The emissions from natural sources varies due to \climate variations; as an example, bacteria in wetlands release methane and less is emitted in dry cycles when wetlands shrink. 

The Affordable Care Act controversy rages on. In this week's BMJ, journalist Jeanne Lenzer says the basic assumption that US people don't have enough health care is misleading and in reality, Americans have too much - and that unnecessary care costs an estimated $800 billion per year. The article arrives as an international conference named 'Preventing Overdiagnosis' was announced for September, 2013 in the United States, hosted by The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, in partnership with the BMJ, Consumer Reports and Bond University of Australia.

Researchers have found a way to 'toggle' the intestinal enzymes responsible for processing starchy foods on and off, which could lead to better control of those processes in people with Type 2 diabetes.This "toggling" was discovered in the lab of  Simon Fraser University chemist Mario Pinto, who has designed inhibitors capable of regulating each of the four starch-digesting enzymes known as alpha-glucosidases. Three of those enzymes are responsible for generating glucose from starch, each in different ways. A fourth enzyme breaks down sucrose, also giving glucose. Occasionally one or more of the enzymes is missing, which also affects how glucose is created, Pinto explains.

While rabid Democrats charge Republicans with racism and rabid Republicans do the same to Democrats, the least partisan people and therefore most independent are really the most likely to use race as a criterion, according to a new survey.  While a Republican candidate outraged the opposition by stating 47% were going to vote Democrat no matter what, voting history shows that is largely true on both sides.  That 6% of swing voters might be a problem for President Obama, if the survey results are accurate.

Does clean air have a cost where it makes sense versus where it doesn't? What about human life in general?  Economists still try to create a metric and a group from the University of Chicago and MIT tackled the financial results of extensive environmental regulations, which have brought cleaner air and health improvements to the United States but also increased the cost of manufacturing and led to reduced industrial productivity along with outsourcing jobs. 

Biologists of the coming decade are going to need to know a whole lot of physics, math and statistics. Everyone is going to need to do more math, really. The days when it was just a language science used here and there is long gone.

There is a common belief that men are empowered sexually. Men know this is silly, of course. It is women who decide each day if they want to have sex or not, not men.  It's in college that young men learn this lesson.

Gold has reached an all-time high and researchers have discovered a bacterium's ability to withstand incredible amounts of toxicity is key to creating 24-karat gold.  Alchemy was once a pipe dream of ancient chemistry but now it is entirely possible, if you have enough energy.  In the metal-tolerant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans it instead takes massive amounts of toxicity; the bacterium can grow on gold chloride, liquid gold, a toxic chemical compound found in nature.

A new study says that the use of herbicides in the production of three genetically modified herbicide-tolerant crops, cotton, soybeans and corn, has gone up rather than down. The counterintuitive estimate is based on an analysis of publicly available data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Statistics Service. 

Here is a missing link story that won't make evolutionary biologists crazy. Epigenetics is the most recent craze in science media discussions of biology, it analyzes specific patterns of chemical tags that overlay the DNA structure, determining how tightly the DNA is packaged and how accessible certain genes are to be switched on or off. Epigenetics shows us that the genetic code held within DNA represents only part of the blueprint of life. Because it is not understood, we even get speculation that voting preferences can be framed in termed of epigenetics, like in the brain.

If you watched "Wall-E" you likely laughed at the depiction of hugely obese people riding around in hover cars drinking Big Gulps - surely a science that could create the technology to generate an entire artificial world could solve how to drink Big Gulps without turning ban happy like California or New York.