In nuclear reactors, energetic neutrons slam into metal atoms that are ordered in a lattice, displacing them with enough force to trigger a cascade of collisions. Laurent Béland,Yuri Osetsky and Roger Stoller, of the Energy Dissipation to Defect Evolution Energy Frontier Research Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modeled radiation damage and discovered that the number of defects ultimately created in a material correlates with atomic displacements that high-pressure shock waves generate early in the collision cascade.

Researchers produced the first molecular map of the genes that are active in the various cells of the human pancreas. They have also revealed differences in genetic activity between people with type 2 diabetes and healthy controls. 

For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn’t, and one popular notion was that methane, with 23-34 times (yes, it is unclear) the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide, could have reigned supreme for most of the first 3.5 billion years of Earth history, when oxygen was absent initially. 

Environmentalists today are in a panic about greenhouse gases, but between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago, microscopic ocean dwellers really needed them. The sun was 10 to 15 percent dimmer than it is today—too weak to warm the planet on its own. Earth required a potent mix of heat-trapping gases to keep the oceans liquid and livable.

Postglacial rebound, uplift in Greenland blamed on global warming, has actually made it harder to measure ice loss due to global warming, according to a new paper in Science Advances.

The third non-browning Arctic apple variety - yes, using science - the Arctic Fuji, has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA APHIS). Science has shown they are the same as conventional apples, they just won't brown as much, so all of those organic food people will have a lot less food waste.

Except organic food shoppers will never buy these, because they love food waste and environmental strain if it means getting to hate science again.

Jamie Samson and Marta Manser from the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental 1Studies at UZH studied colonies of Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) in the wild at the Kalahari Research Center in South Africa. The diurnal rodents temporarily store their food reserves in several hiding places. As their habitat is very arid and sparsely vegetated, points of reference in the environment, such as trees or bushes, are few and far between. The UZH researchers have now discovered how the social rodents orient themselves to find their way back to their temporary food stashes. "The squirrels probably use the position of the sun as the most important cue to roughly adjust their direction of movement," explains Samson.

Position of the sun as a rough guide