Scientists concerned that global warming may release huge stores of methane from reservoirs beneath Arctic tundra and deposits of marine hydrates – a theory known as the “clathrate gun” hypothesis – have turned to geologic history to search for evidence of significant methane release during past warming events.

A new study published this week in the journal Nature suggests, however, that the last ice age transition to a warmer climate some 11,500 years ago did not include massive methane flux from marine sediments or the tundra. Instead, the likely source of rising levels of atmospheric methane was from tropical wetlands, authors of the new study say.

Ice has always been fascinating to Alison Criscitiello.

“I had a science teacher who did a short unit on glaciers … I couldn’t believe they were real,” she says. That classroom encounter when she was in eight grade in Winchester, Massachusetts, had a lasting impact.

Caffeine, the widely consumed stimulant and igniter of sluggish mornings, has been found to temper taste buds temporarily, making food and drink seem less sweet, according to new Cornell University research.

It’s been well established that obesity is a contributor to cancer risk, but how it actually causes cancer is still a question that hasn’t been fully explained.

Magnesium batteries offer promise for safely powering modern life – unlike traditional lithium ion batteries, they are not flammable or subject to exploding – but their ability to store energy has been limited.

Researchers reported Aug. 24 in the journal Nature Communications the discovery of a new design for the battery cathode, drastically increasing the storage capacity and upending conventional wisdom that the magnesium-chloride bond must be broken before inserting magnesium into the host.

One white-faced capuchin monkey sticks its fingers deep into the eye sockets of another capuchin it’s friends with. A capuchin uses her ally’s body parts to whack their common enemy. These behaviors become entrenched in the repertoires of the inventors. But in the first case, the behavior spreads to other group members, and in the second case it does not.

You may think you’re just an average Joe, but according to your metabolomics data your body is percolating some expressive information about your daily life.

Even as robots become increasingly common, they remain incredibly difficult to make. From designing and modeling to fabricating and testing, the process is slow and costly: Even one small change can mean days or weeks of rethinking and revising important hardware.

But what if there were a way to let non-experts craft different robotic designs — in one sitting?

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are getting closer to doing exactly that. In a new paper, they present a system called “Interactive Robogami” that lets you design a robot in minutes, and then 3-D print and assemble it in as little as four hours.
 

New mapping methods developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory can help urban planners minimize the environmental impacts of cities’ water and energy demands on surrounding stream ecologies.

In an analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an ORNL-led team used high-resolution geospatial modeling to quantify the effects of land, energy, and water infrastructures on the nation’s rivers and streams. 

A fast, simple blood test for ulcerative colitis using infrared spectroscopy could provide a cheaper, less invasive alternative for screening compared to colonoscopy, which is now the predominant test, according to a study between the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.