Carbon sequestration promises to address greenhouse-gas emissions by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and injecting it deep below the Earth's surface, where it would permanently solidify into rock. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that current carbon-sequestration technologies may eliminate up to 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.

While such technologies may successfully remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, researchers in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT have found that once injected into the ground, less carbon dioxide is converted to rock than previously imagined.

Consumers usually look for the lowest price when shopping for a product. But can prices sometimes just feel right? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, consumers are drawn to prices with rounded numbers when a purchase is motivated by feelings.

"A rounded price ($100.00) encourages consumers to rely on feelings when evaluating products, while a non-rounded price ($98.76) encourages consumers to rely on reason. When a purchase is driven by feelings, rounded prices lead to a subjective experience of feeling right," write authors Monica Wadhwa (INSEAD, Singapore) and Kuangjie Zhang (Nanyang Technological University).

Researchers have revealed that the colonization of the gut of young mice by certain types of bacteria can lead to immune responses later in life that are linked to disease. Increases in the levels of segmented filamentous bacteria can trigger changes in the lymphoid tissue of the mouse gut that result in the production of antibodies that attack components of the cell nucleus. This type of damage is a hallmark of autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus erythematosus and systemic sclerosis where organs throughout the body are damaged by wayward immune responses. The findings are published in The EMBO Journal.

Glass looks like it is solid but telling a materials engineer that glass is a solid is like telling an aerospace engineer Bernoulli is why planes fly (or Newton, for that matter - whichever you say, they will argue the opposite).

Glass flows - but slowly. The question is does it ever really stop flowing? Researchers at the University of Bristol and Kyoto University used computer simulation and information theory to try and settle this long-standing bar bet in the physics community.

First, the premise: We know glass flows at high heat because we have all seen glass blowers shape swans and such. Once the glass has cooled down to room temperature though, it has become solid and we can pour wine in it or make window panes out of it.

If you are in the United States and travel to Mexico, you are cautioned not to drink the water, just like if you travel to Taiwan or China you are cautioned not to eat chicken bought from a street vendor; people are immune to some nasty stuff you probably are not.

Getting diarrhea in Mexico is called Montezuma's revenge - it means the natives are still getting back at the Spanish 500 years later and the rest of the world is thrown in for good measure. But it doesn't just end there. Taking antibiotics for diarrhea may put travelers visiting developing parts of the world at higher risk for contracting superbugs and spreading drug-resistant bacteria to their home countries.

Researchers at the RIKEN-Max Planck Joint Research Center in Japan have demonstrated that hallmark symptoms of Alzheimer's disease can be reduced when sugars are prevented from binding to one of the key enzymes implicated in the disease. The new findings, reported in EMBO Molecular Medicine, show that abnormal attachment of a particular sugar to the enzyme BACE1 is a critical factor leading to the formation of Aβ plaques in the brain, and that plaques were reduced and cognitive performance improved when this action was prevented in mice through loss of the enzyme GnT-III. In doing so, this work has revealed a novel mechanism for Alzheimer's disease development, potentially opening the way to a new approach for treatment.