With the successful leveling off of CO2, a long-lasting greenhouse gas implicated for most global warming, due to a switch to natural gas, activists have been focusing on methane.

While some of the claims have been controversial and used decades old Soviet data to exaggerate the issue, we do know that about 20 percent of methane emissions are due to livestock. Most people and a better standard of living means more need for food. Ruminants, like sheep and cows, burp methane.

In Europe, the presence of toxic chemicals has been considered a localized problem affecting only a few bodies of water but a new paper says there are large scale ecological risks for several thousands of European aquatic systems.  The culprit: toxic chemicals.

They say that chemical toxicity represents an ecological threat to almost half of all European bodies of water, and in approximately 15% of cases, the biota in freshwater systems may even be subject to acute mortality. 

Mitochondria are cell organelles located within animal and human cells. They produce energy for the organism, possess their own genetic material - mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) - and are transmitted exclusively by the mother.

Depending on their activity and tasks, different numbers of mitochondria are present in a cell - usually a few hundred to a thousand per body cell.

Decreased cognitive ability and autistic-like behaviors have been linked to disruption of the function of the Adenomatous Polyposis Coli (APC) gene by Tufts researchers who deleted the gene from select neurons in the developing mouse brain.

The mice showed reduced social behavior, increased repetitive behavior, and impaired learning and memory formation, similar to behaviors seen in individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities. The authors say this study is the first to evaluate how the loss of APC from nerve cells in the forebrain affects brain development, learning, and behavior. The research team, led by Michele Jacob, Ph.D., engineered a new mouse model for studying cognitive and autistic-like disabilities. 

A new study has found that the eye's optical quality deteriorates after alcohol consumption. Not just how the images are interpreted, the way some unemployed guy who is 'getting his band together' looks more attractive at 2 AM after a few shots of Jägermeister, but the physical eye itself.

The authors say ethanol in the tear-film is one of the causes: it covers the surface of the eye, disturbs the outer layer and favors evaporation of the aqueous content of the tear, deteriorating the optical quality of the image we see. The deterioration in vision is significantly greater in subjects with breath alcohol content over the legal limit for driving, which is another obvious reason to call Uber and not drive yourself.

While probiotics don't do much of anything except make companies rich, fecal microbiota transplantation --- the process of delivering stool bacteria from a healthy donor to a patient suffering from intestinal infection with the bacterium Clostridium difficile --- has been shown to work by restoring healthy bacteria and functioning to the recipient's gut, according to a new study.