Scientific American

A forest floor can store lots of atmospheric carbon, helping to limit global warming that results from carbon dioxide emissions. Most of that storage, scientists have thought, is found in tree leaves and branches that absorb carbon, eventually fall to the ground and slowly decay into soil. A new study in Sweden, however, indicates that 50 to 70 percent of the carbon bound in soil is actually from tree roots and the fungi that grow on them.

Spending about 100 hours each month in the air, flight attendants are bombarded with pesticides, radiation, ozone and any illnesses passengers carry on board. Now new research shows that they also fly along with some of the highest levels ever measured for some flame retardants.

LONDON – The good news is that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to decline. "Over the last four years, our emissions of the dangerous carbon pollution that threatens our planet have actually fallen," said President Obama in his State of the Union address last month.

LONDON – Diarrhea, killer of 1.5 million children annually, is likely to become more prevalent in many developing countries as the climate changes, a report says. But the authors found an unexpected twist in the way the climate is likely to affect the disease.

TUPPER LAKE, N.Y. – Scott Lizotte was hopeful as he pulled his iPhone out of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. "It's going to be six degrees tonight," he said, studying the 10-day forecast. It's mid-March, and he's standing between a skidder and a log loader in a snowy clearing of a 12,000-acre private forest near Tupper Lake, a former lumber town in New York's Adirondack Mountains.

The U.S. Army ’s Military Intelligence Corps wants to equip its field operatives with a pocket-size tool they can use to locate and identify adversaries, and then disseminate that information to nearby troop commanders as quickly as possible. Their tool of choice--a modified Google Android smartphone with specialized apps, a setup none too different from the ones so many civilians use for multitasking in their daily lives. [More]

Obese people considering gastric bypass surgery to help trim their fat might one day have another option: swallowing a new supply of gut bacteria. A study in mice suggests that weight loss after bypass surgery is caused not by the operation itself, but at least in part by a change in the amounts of various species of microbes in the gut.

Astronomers have discovered a new kind of supernova, a star explosion so weak that scientists dubbed it a miniature stellar blast.

I take issue with the celebration of Paul Erd s’ 100 th birthday.

WASHINGTON, D.C.--A bird that once darkened the skies of the 19th-century U.S. no longer exists, except as well-preserved museum specimens bearing bits of DNA. An ambitious new effort aims to use the latest techniques of genetic manipulation to bring the passenger pigeon back , as North Dakotan Ben Novak, a would-be de-extinction scientist working on the Revive & Restore project at the Long Now Foundation, told the crowd at the TEDxDeExtinction event here on March 15. [More]

Physicists recently confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had indeed found a Higgs boson last July, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science. The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news," says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable."

Bright green doesn’t seem like the best choice for camouflage. But the image of a vibrant green stick insect, Timema poppensis, perched almost invisibly atop the matching leaves of its host, a coast redwood ( Sequoia sempervirens ), provides visual support to the idea that color is a key part of coevolution, an ecological process in which two or more species develop together.

Is there a chance that human intervention --rising temperatures, massive land-use changes, biodiversity loss and so on--could “tip” the entire world into a new climatic state? And if so, does that change what we should do about it?

If you associate modern British fiction with the cool, detached tones of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, and US fiction with Jonathan Franzen's emotional inner worlds or John Irving's sentimentality, it seems you have good reason. An analysis of the digitized texts of English-language books over the past century concludes that, since the 1980s, words that carry emotional content have become significantly more common in US books than in British ones.

Researchers have deciphered the molecular structures of two of the brain's crucial lock-and-key mechanisms. The two molecules are receptors for the natural neurotransmitter serotonin -- which regulates activities such as sleep, appetite and mood -- and could provide targets for future drugs to combat depression, migraines or obesity. 

The mass extinction that wiped out many species at the end of the Triassic period some 200 million years ago made way for the dinosaurs' domination of Earth for the next 135 million years. Now, researchers have determined the timing of a possible trigger for that Triassic extinction event with unprecedented precision.   

From Simons Science News ( find original story here ).

Excerpted from Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation , by Dan Fagin. Copyright © March 19, 2013, Bantam Books.

Genetically engineered immune cells can drive an aggressive type of leukemia into retreat, a small clinical trial suggests.

LONDON – Plankton, tiny marine organisms, are a good way of cleansing the atmosphere of one of the main greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide. To do this they need dissolved iron to help them to grow, and if they lack iron then they cannot do much to reduce CO2 levels.