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A study published today in Nature Geoscience says that increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions continue to outstrip the world's natural ability to absorb carbon and claim that drastic cuts in fossil fuel emissions are the only way to mitigate climate change. The authors report that over the last 50 years the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that remained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent - the rest was absorbed by the Earth's carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. During that time the fraction has likely increased from 40 per cent to 45 per cent, suggesting a decrease in the efficiency of the natural sinks. The team also offers evidence that the sinks are responding to climate change and variability.

Despite widespread educational efforts aimed at helping the public make healthy choices, it's understood among experts that people often fail to comply with the advice offered by their doctors and others in the health community. To correct this deficiency in compliance, some researchers are now proposing that text messaging be used to send out health tips to consumers. Given it's popularity and low expense, they say,  regular text messaging may be just the thing to prompt people to make behavioral changes for the sake of health

A potentially dangerous level of carbon dioxide and methane gas haunts Lake Kivu, the freshwater lake system bordering Rwanda and the Republic of Congo.Scientists can't say for sure if the volatile mixture at the bottom of the lake will remain still for another 1,000 years or someday explode without warning. In a region prone to volcanic and seismic activity, the fragility of Lake Kivu is a serious matter. Compounding the precarious situation is the presence of approximately 2 million people, many of them refugees, living along the north end of the lake.

Psychologists earlier this month confirmed what most parents likely already know about their  teenage children. The more they're involved in their kids' lives (Specifically, by knowing where their children are, who they're with and what they're doing), the less likely it is they will engage in illicit behavior--like smoking marijuana.

People associate all kinds of physical features with good health; a slim waistline, full head of hair, and chiseled abs are all typical examples. Now researchers are suggesting that another feature may tell an awful lot about a person's health--their skin color. With the publication of a new study in the International Journal of Primatology, a team of scientists say that the color of a person's skin affects how healthy and therefore attractive they appear, and have found that diet may be crucial to achieving the most desirable complexion.

If you don't think there's anything to learn by observing a bunch of drunk college students while they watch football and yell at the TV, you're missing out on a valuable cultural lesson. By studying the emotional reactions of college football fans to their favorite teams' on-field performances, communication experts say they have gained important insights into the relationship between entertainment and human emotion.Ohio State University researchers studied fans of two college football teams as they watched the teams' annual rivalry game on television. They found that fans of the winning team who, at some point during the game, were almost certain their team would lose, ended up thinking the game was the most thrilling and suspenseful.

Drug resistant infectious organisms pose a very serious threat to society, and are perhaps one of the biggest challenges that medical researchers face in their fight to keep people healthy. Despite the trouble that antibiotic resistance has caused for modern medicine over the years, researchers at the University of Gothenburg are taking on an innovative project that may help put this evolutionary phenomenon in check.

ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta has swung by Earth for the third and final time, skimming past our planet to pick up a gravitational boost for an epic journey to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta passed over the ocean just South of the Indonesian island of Java at exactly 08:45:40 CET with a speed of 13.34 km/s with respect to Earth and an altitude of 2481 km. The successful swingby was confirmed at 09:05 CET and spacecraft operators have confirmed that the swingby provided a boost of 3.6 km/s. 

Mice who had the PKCI/HINT1 gene removed had an anti-depressant-like and anxiolytic-like effect, say esearchers writing in BMC Neuroscience who applied a battery of behavioral tests to the PKCI/HINT1 knockout animals, concluding that the deleted gene may have an important role in mood regulation.

Elisabeth Barbier and Jia Bei Wang, from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Maryland, USA, carried out the experiments to investigate the role of the gene in regulating mood function. Wang, the corresponding author of the paper, said, "The knockout mice displayed behaviors indicative of changes in mood function, such as increased perseverance and reduced anxiety in open spaces".

Many a parent has been driven to the point of madness by successive "why?" questions from preschoolers, but it's a good sign that they ask and they do better if they get a detailed explanation than if you just answer 'because.'

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), recently accepted a six-figure grant from the Coca-Cola Corporation to "educate consumers about the role their products can play in a healthy, active lifestyle," and nutrition experts from Harvard University are not very happy about the new partnership.

Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is loosing mass at an accelerating rate, according to a new study published in Science. The mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased melt water production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometer of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year.