News Articles

Every 100,000 years a "super-eruption" of a major volcanic system occurs - one of the most catastrophic natural events on Earth - yet it's hard to know what triggers these violent explosions.The eruption of super-volcanoes dwarfs the eruptions of recent volcanoes and can trigger planetary climate change by inducing Ice Ages and other impacts. One such event was the Huckleberry Ridge eruption of present-day Yellowstone Park about two million years ago, which was more than 2,000 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington. These super-eruptions are second only to meteor strikes in their impact.

In Norway, after a psychopath shot up an island summer camp, several first-person shooter games disappeared from the market for a while - yet the shooter was an organic farmer and organic produce was not pulled from shelves.

Good news for migraine sufferers.  Your treatment may have gotten a little cheaper.  Exercise is often prescribed as a treatment for migraine, though without sufficient scientific evidence that it really works, but research from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg shows that exercise is just as good as drugs at preventing migraines. And so are relaxation techniques.

Electrocrystallization, electric-field-induced phase transformation, predicts that under the influence of sufficiently high electric fields, liquid droplets of certain materials will undergo solidification, forming crystallites at temperature and pressure conditions that correspond to liquid droplets at field-free conditions. A study in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C says they have done it.The researchers set out first to explore a phenomenon described by Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor in 1964 in the course of his study of the effect of lightning on raindrops, expressed as changes in the shape of liquid drops when passing through an electric field.

In Jewish and Christian tradition, Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Recent evidence shows that multiple writers had a hand in composing the text of the Torah and the other books of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament are also thought to be composites. 

Global warming is bad but at least we have a chance to control it.  Simple life hundreds of millions of years ago had to just go with the flow so when global glaciation put a chill on things back then, the only way even simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived was in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to today's Red Sea, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.

A particular kind of sugar molecule had a big impact on human evolution and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, according to a new study in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the first evidence of a link between cell surface sugars, Darwinian sexual selection, and immune function in the context of human origins

8,000 years ago, which is basically yesterday in geological time, a now-vanished glacial lake covered a huge expanse of today's Canadian prairie and the rich farmland in the Red River Valley. As big as Hudson Bay, the lake was fed by melting glaciers as they receded at the end of the last ice age. At its largest, Glacial Lake Agassiz, as it is known, covered most of the Canadian province of Manitoba, plus a good part of western Ontario and the Minnesota-North Dakota border.

You can thank the stretching of continents and the oceans that filled those newly created basins for the Earth we know today.  Rifting is one of the fundamental geological forces that have shaped our planet. But rifting involves areas deep below the Earth's surface so scientists have been unable to understand fully how it occurs.

Using one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors on the planet, the Borexino instrument, an international team are measuring the flow of solar neutrinos reaching Earth more precisely than ever before. 

Canola, a specific edible type of rapeseed developed in the 1970s, contains about 40 percent oil and became popular as a substitute for traditional cooking oils. The name is derived as “Can” (for Canada) and “ola” (for oil low acid) and Canola oil is the lowest in saturated fats of all commonly used oils.  While much is imported, North Dakota leads the U.S. in canola, approximately 92 percent of domestic production. 

A new review has found evidence that a specific gene is linked to suicidal behavior, which may be one of the many complex causes of suicide. In the past, studies have implicated the gene for brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in suicidal behavior. BDNF is involved in the development of the nervous system. After pooling results from 11 previous studies and adding their own study data involving people with schizophrenia, scientists writing in
the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology  found that among people with a psychiatric diagnosis, those with the methionine ("met") variation of the gene had a higher risk of suicidal behavior compared to those with the valine variation.