News Articles

Agriculture is a breathtaking achievement of modern science. We are on the path to being able to feed the world for the first time in history and the upward trend in obesity is due to the fact that more food has been produced at lower cost with less environmental strain than ever believed realistic.
But it still has a price. There are claims that approximately 35% of global greenhouse gases come from agriculture.
A new paper argues that regenerative, organic farming, ranching and land use could lead to sequestering several hundred billion tons of excess CO2. Increasing the soil's organic content will not only fix carbon and reduce emissions, it will also improve the soil's ability to retain water and nutrients and resist pests and droughts. 

It's a First World Idyll that ancient indigenous people sustained themselves using nature's bounty, in harmony with the land.
Science knows otherwise. Instead, from Alaska to Washington, indigenous people created productive clam gardens to ensure abundant and sustainable clam harvests. There was nothing natural about it.

On April 25th, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, claiming over 5,000 lives and affecting millions more. Relief efforts are under way and satellite imagery is helping to visualize the damage but radar images from the ESA Sentinel-1A satellite showed why Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, experienced so much damage The maximum land deformation, shown in before and after pictures, is 8 miles away. The two acquisition dates lead to rainbow-colored interference patterns in the combined image, known as an ‘interferogram’, enabling scientists to quantify the ground movement.

The world's population is getting healthier and part of that reason for that is sanitation - but a larger population and a still limited infrastructure means a complex and multi-dimensional approach is needed to manage a rising tide of solid wasteThere is no magic bullet solution like importing modern trucks or technologies or to improve roads. The challenges are daunting - the World Bank’s Urban Development department estimates that the amount of municipal solid waste will reach 2.2 billion tons per year over the next decade. 

British people may not like blood rain but Sahara Desert dust is not traveling 2,000 miles over an ocean just to make their cars dirty - it also helps cool things down. Researchers have analyzed the composition and radiative effect of desert aerosols during two episodes which simultaneously affected Badajoz (Spain) and Évora (Portugal) in August 2012 and found that it caused radiative cooling of the Earth's surface. Atmospheric aerosols (solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere) are difficult to examine for various reasons - they remain in the atmosphere for only a short time and their cause may be natural or anthropogenic.

Genetic variation is important in a healthy population and recombination, or crossing-over, which occurs when sperm and egg cells are formed and segments of each chromosome pair are interchanged, is a vital part of maintaining genetic variation.
Honeybees take it to a whole other level and a new study finds that the extreme recombination rates found in this species - 20X higher than humans, higher than measured in any other animal  - seem to be crucial for their survival.

Every day, thousands of people need donated blood but blood transfusions require that the blood type of the donor match that of the recipient., unless it is blood without A- or B-type antigens, such as type O, that can be given to all of those in need. Mismatched blood with A or B antigens could provoke an immune reaction and even cause death. 
For that reason, Type O is often in short supply, but science may soon have a solution. Stephen G. Withers and colleagues write in Journal of the American Chemical Society of an efficient way to transform A and B blood into a neutral type O that can be given to any patient. 

Scientists have mapped the human genes triggered by the phytonutrients in soy, revealing the complex role the legume plays in both preventing and advancing breast cancer.

New genetic testing of Iñupiat people currently living in Alaska's North Slope has determined the migration patterns and ancestral pool of the people who populated the North American Arctic over the last 5,000 years and found that all mitochondrial DNA haplogroups previously found in the ancient remains of Neo- and Paleo-Eskimos and living Inuit peoples from across the North American Arctic were found within the people living in North Slope villages.

Some of the ocean's underwater volcanoes did not erupt from hot spots in the Earth's mantle but instead formed from cracks or fractures in the oceanic crust, which would help explain the spectacular bend in the famous underwater range known as the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, where the bottom half kinks at a sixty degree angle to the east of its top half. 
It has long been accepted that as the Earth's plates move over fixed hot spots in its underlying mantle, resulting eruptions create chains of now extinct underwater volcanoes or 'seamounts'.

Climate change may have been be responsible for the abrupt collapse of civilization on the fringes of the Tibetan Plateau around 2,000 B.C. - but it wasn't the modern political connotation of climate change, with man-made carbon dioxide causing warming, it was global cooling.

Researchers have developed a mouse model of brain-metastatic breast cancer and found the potential of stem-cell-based therapy to eliminate metastatic cells from the brain and prolong survival is strong.
The research team developed a mouse model that closely mimics what is seen in patients. They found that injecting into the carotid artery breast cancer cells that express markers allowing them to enter the brain - cells labeled with bioluminescent and fluorescent markers to enable tracking by imaging technologies - resulted in the formation of many metastatic tumors throughout the brain, mimicking what is seen in advanced breast cancer patients. Current therapeutic options for such patients are limited, particularly when there are many metastases.