After oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose about 600 million years ago, earth got the first proliferation of animal life. Between then and now, numerous short lived biotic events took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically.

Engaging in some Do It Yourself projects or gardening can cut the risk of a heart attack/stroke and prolong life by as much as 30 per cent among the 60+ age group, indicates a new paper. 

They might seem like routine activities but they are as good as exercise, and more fun, which is ideal for older people who don't often do that much formal exercise, according to the scholars who based their findings on almost 4,000 sixty-year-olds in Stockholm, Sweden, who had their cardiovascular health tracked for around 12 years. At the start of the study, participants took part in a health check, which included information on lifestyle, such as diet, smoking, and alcohol intake, and how physically active they were.

Protecting carbon-storing forests in the developing world may be easier than mobilizing government bureaucracies; a recent paper finds that local communities, using simple tools like ropes and sticks, can produce forest carbon data on par with results by government employees using high-tech devices.  

Centuries of economic hypotheses have been based on the premise of rational actors: when given a choice between two items, people select the one they value more. But as with many simple premises, this one has a flaw in that it is demonstrably untrue.

Yet that was never really the case. Too many exceptions mean a rule was never a rule anyway - there are lots of examples where people act against their own apparent interests. One of these biases — the mere fact of possessing something raises its value to its owner — is known as the "endowment effect."  

A new paper seeks to address whether this bias is truly universal and speculates that it may have been present in humanity's evolutionary past.

A group including a consultant, a sustainability advocate and an environmental scientist argued today at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver that while the use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling for "tight oil" is an important contributor to U.S. energy supply, it is not going to result in long-term sustainable production or allow the U.S. to become a net oil exporter.

Having children early and in rapid succession lead to high infant mortality rates in the South Asian countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, according to a paper in
the International Journal of Gynecology&Obstetrics.

1 in 14 births to young mothers in those countries ends with the death of the child within the first year, say researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.