Recent decades may have been the wettest in 3,500 years in North East Tibet – according to climate researchers at the University of East Anglia (UK) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Lanzhou, China).

Researchers looked at 3,500-year-long tree ring records from North East Tibet to estimate annual precipitation. They found that recent decades have likely been the wettest on record in this semi-arid region.

The precipitation records have been reconstructed using sub-fossil, archaeological and living juniper tree samples from the north-eastern Tibetan Plateau. They reveal a trend towards wider growth rings, implying moister growing conditions – with the last 50 years seeing increasing amounts of rainfall.

From keeping up a daily exercise routine to eating healthy foods and avoiding impulse purchases, self-control is hard work. Ironically, when it comes to making decisions about our bodies, a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research finds we make better health care decisions when we're feeling tired and run down.

"We proposed that people are more motivated to engage in healthful behavior when they are depleted and perceive their safety to be at stake," write authors Monika Lisjak (Erasmus University) and Angela Y. Lee (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University).

New technologies are changing the way we collect biodiversity data. What once required taking expensive, bulky and fragile equipment on field trips can now be collected on cheap, compact and robust devices.

A recent paper in the Biodiversity Data Journal on the construction of an environmental data-logger using the Arduino platform is described, in hopes that it will encourage the adoption of new data collection technologies by biodiversity scientists and foster new collaborations with both electronics hobbyists and electronics engineers who have an interest in biodiversity.

Juggling may seem like mere entertainment, but a study led by Johns Hopkins engineers used this circus skill to gather critical clues about how vision and the sense of touch help control the way humans and animals move their limbs in a repetitive way, such as in running. The findings eventually may aid in the treatment of people with neurological diseases and could lead to prosthetic limbs and robots that move more efficiently.

The study was published online recently by the Journal of Neurophysiology and will be the cover article in the journal's March 2014 print edition.

Recent research has shown an alarming number of peer-reviewed papers are irreproducible and it isn't just social sciences surveys or weak observational studies. It's in fields like biology.

This news release is available in German.

Wetlands, including peatlands, have a high content of humic substances, which are organic compounds that form during incomplete decomposition of biomass. Under anoxic conditions, soil bacteria can use these organic compounds during respiration as electron acceptors. Many organisms (including us humans) instead use oxygen as the electron acceptor.