Earth's largest mass extinction occurred some 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of life on land, including the largest insects known to have inhabited the Earth. Multiple hypotheses have tried to determine the cause of what's now known as the end-Permian extinction, including everything from an asteroid impact to massive volcanic eruptions and a cataclysmic cascade of environmental events.

While the developed world has levels of scientific and technical capacity that allow crop pests to be effectively managed, poorer nations, where food production is incredibly important, are caught in a tug-of-war between modern agriculture and an activist culture that tells them not to trust science.

As a result, not only are crop pests not effectively managed, with the disastrous drops in yields that brings, but no one can even be sure what crop pests there are.

Cool roofs, green roofs and hybrids of the two are all of the rage for city planners who want to do something about greenhouse-gas induced warming.

They sound great but is it going to work, or is it another idealized wish that incurs cost but has little benefit (like replacing spoons in the Congressional cafeteria with corn-based alternatives that melted in soup and ending up being worse for the environment) outside public relations campaigns?
 

America has a looming cost of services crisis but in the UK it's already here; people who retire expecting a certain standard of living have overwhelmed the tax base. To keep people working longer, a professor at the University of Southampton recommends the worldwide removal of the fixed or default retirement age.

There used to be a saying that we should all try to be the person our dogs think we are.

In the 21st century we idealize ourselves in online avatars, according to a new paper in Psychological Science,
 which has far-reaching implications if how you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world.

Hemp plants with scientifically enhanced increase in oleic acid could lead to an attractive cooking oil that is similar to olive oil in terms of fatty acid content - but has a much longer shelf life as well as greater heat tolerance and hopefully a lot less fraud associated with it than olive oil has.

Using fast-track molecular plant breeding, the scientists selected hemp plants lacking the active form of an enzyme involved in making polyunsaturated fatty acids. These plants made less poly-unsaturated fatty acids and instead accumulated higher levels of the mono-unsaturated oleic acid. The research team used conventional plant breeding techniques to develop the plants into a “High Oleic Hemp” line and higher oleic acid content was demonstrated in a Yorkshire field trial.