At the Applied Networking Research Workshop, a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one group claimed critical communications infrastructure, buried fiber optic cable, could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years. 

They estimate that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. The most susceptible U.S. cities are predictably New York, Miami and Seattle. 

Coffee is the official drink of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), so much so that a new study finds that it's downright Pavlovian. Even the smell of coffee boosts numerical performance. 

In their experiment, scholars administered a 10-question Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT - the analytical portion of a computer adaptive test required by many graduate schools) in a computer lab to about 100 undergraduate business students, divided into two groups. One group took the test in the presence of an ambient coffee-like scent, while a control group took the same test - but in an unscented room.

It's no secret that marijuana usage leads to hunger, it even has a colloquial name - "the munchies." But understanding the neuroscience of that that could also help people who lose their appetites during illness. 

Some 4,000 years before domesticated agriculture, hunter-gatherers baked their own bread, according to a discovery at an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan.

Researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked around 14,400 years ago, the oldest direct evidence of bread found to date, predating the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. The findings suggest that bread production based on wild cereals may have encouraged hunter-gatherers to cultivate cereals, and thus contributed to the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period.

Nature is not just out to kill us, it is out to kill itself, in the interest of surviving over the long term. That is why even the most wholesome backyard organic garden is a hotbed of combat between plants and unseen microorganisms in the soil fighting for space to grow.

To defeat a plant, a microbe might produce and use toxic chemicals - but then the microbe also needs immunity from its own poisons. The genes that create protective shield in microorganisms could become a new, highly effective weed killer and the first new class of commercial herbicides in more than 30 years.

While environmentalists raise millions of dollars insisting they will get targeted pesticides (e.g. neonicotinoids) banned to save bees that aren't really in peril, science is looking at things which do actually put bees at risk.

At the top of the list is not pesticides, it's nature. An international team has discovered evidence of 27 previously unknown viruses in bees, which could help scientists design strategies to prevent the spread of viral pathogens among these important pollinators.