The atmosphere contained little carbon dioxide (CO₂) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago. Why did it rise when the Earth’s climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says a new study based on newly developed isotope measurements.

Around 20,000 years ago, the atmospheric CO₂ concentration was distinctly lower than in the following warm period, showed measurements from Antarctic ice cores. An international team of glaciologists looked even further back and found that the close connection between carbon dioxide and temperature has existed over the past 800,000 years: with low CO₂ concentrations during the Ice Ages and higher CO₂ values during warm periods.

Vincent van Gogh's series of sunflower paintings, while spectacular to fans of his work, have also intrigued scientists because they depict a mutation whose genetic basis was a mystery. In a new study, a team of University of Georgia scientists reveal the mutation behind the distinctive, thick bands of yellow "double flowers" that the post-Impressionist artist painted more than 100 years ago.

SCUBA-2, the most powerful camera ever developed for observing light at ‘sub-mm’ wavelengths (light that has a wavelength 1000 times longer than we can see with our eyes), has begun a revolutionary new study of cosmic star-formation history.

Are you ugly?  Maybe that's something else to blame your mother about.

Female cognitive ability can impact how handsome males become over evolutionary time, say biologists from The University of Texas at Austin, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Males across the animal world have evolved elaborate traits to attract females, from huge peacock tails to complex bird songs and frog calls. But there is a price - predators are attracted to increased elaboration, placing an enormous cost to males with these sexy traits. In a new paper, a group of biologists have shown that females can also limit the evolution of increased elaboration.

The region around the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), originally captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the mid 1990s, led to the discovery of numerous galaxies billions of light years distant and provided direct visual evidence of the evolution of the Universe. First results from the new imaging, which uses observations from the UK's newly upgraded e-MERLIN radio telescope array together with the EVLA radio array based in New Mexico, show galaxies some 7 billion light years away in unprecedented detail. 

After WikiLeaks released classified and sensitive government documents, predictions of the scale and significance of their impact were overstated.

The desire/hope of proponents that the WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 meant conventional mechanisms for controlling government-held information wee breaking down, heralding a new world of 'radical transparency', were short-lived. Old-style secrecy is still there, argues Alasdair Roberts of Suffolk University Law School.  Leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage is easily defeated in practice.

It turns out radical transparency is hard to achieve and  a technological fix alone will not do it.