Another year, another set of climate records. Here are the top ten signs you are living in a warming world, 2012 edition:
Antarctic researchers found as much as 400 billion metric tons of carbon hidden under the ice sheets, with the potential to seep out as methane and accelerate global warming. The carbon stored under Antarctic ice is on par with the amount held in the northern hemisphere’s frozen permafrost soils and the lower end of estimates…
Researchers said a new computerized model of part of a rat’s cortex predicts connections between neurons, which could help explain how the brains of mammals — including humans — work. “This is a major breakthrough because it would otherwise take decades, if not centuries, to map the location of each synapse in the brain,” said…
NASA’s long-running Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the edge of the solar system and is close to exiting it forever. Scientists have dubbed this region the “magnetic highway” and it’s the last stop before interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 launched 35 years…
Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years. The meeting is bringing together Nasa’s acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US…
A new study by University of Notre Dame biologist Beth Archie and colleagues from Princeton and Duke Universities finds that high-ranking male baboons recover more quickly from injuries and are less likely to become ill than other males. Archie, Jeanne Altmann of Princeton and Susan Alberts of Duke examined health records from the Amboseli Baboon…
Researchers have produced the first comprehensive genetic map of the microbes that live in or on a healthy human body, laying the groundwork for possible new advances in research and in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The accomplishment—the result of a five-year, $173 million initiative called the Human Microbiome Project funded by the National…