For 20 years, some seismologists in Japan, such as Katsuhiko Ishibashi, now professor emeritus at Kobe University, have warned of the seismic and tsunami hazards to the safety of nuclear power plants. 

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the magnitude-9.1 earthquake that struck Tohoku on 11 March, pundits could be found on many Japanese TV stations saying that it was “unforeseeable”.

That's because the 'foreseen' earthquakes were using flawed methodology, argues Robert J. Geller in a Nature Comment piece.   Geller is in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo, and he calls on seismologists in Japan to stop

A study of twin veterans has linked antidepressant use to thicker arteries and therefore possibly increased risk of heart disease and stroke, according to data presented last week at the American College of Cardiology meeting in New Orleans.

The study included 513 middle-aged male twins who both served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Twins are genetically the same but may be different when it comes to other risk factors such as diet, smoking and exercise, so studying them is a good way to distill out the effects of genetics.

Ants and termites have a significant positive impact on crop yields in dryland agriculture, according to a paper published in Nature Communications.   The authors say it is the first study to show a crop yield increase due to soil fauna in the field.

Ants and termites perform the same ecosystem service functions in dryland agriculture that earthworms perform in cooler and wetter areas, but the potential for ants and termites to provide these benefits has received little attention until now, they state.

Their studies on ants and termites in soil showed an average 36 per cent higher wheat crop yield under low tillage but otherwise conventional agricultural management.

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the mosquito branched off the same evolutionary tree as the house fly around 220 million years ago.   Though only a few species of flies gain public attention - pests like house flies, March flies and mosquitoes – there are 152,000 named species of flies, representing around 10 per cent of all species on Earth.   The March fly branched off some 175 million years ago, while the common house fly branched off about 50 million years ago.

Flies originated in wet environments and as they evolved they adapted to feed in almost any nutrient-rich substrate in almost any environment on earth.

A combination of forest byproducts and crustacean shells may be the key to removing radioactive materials from drinking water, researchers from North Carolina State University have found.

The new material is a combination of hemicellulose, a byproduct of forest materials, and chitosan, which are crustacean shells that have been crushed into a powder.  It not only absorbs water, but can actually extract contaminates, such as radioactive iodide, from the water itself. The material forms a solid foam and has potential applications beyond radioactive materials.   The researchers found that it has the ability to remove heavy metals, such as arsenic,  from water or salt from sea water to make clean drinking water.

Entanglement, the quantum mechanical phenomenon, was coined as a term by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 but is still not understood completely.    From an applied perspective, while entangled particles cannot be defined as single particles with defined states but are instead a whole system, that means by entangling single quantum bits, a quantum computer should solve problems considerably faster than conventional computers. 

But understanding entanglement when there are two particles is tough enough.   When there are many, it's even trickier, but a new experiment in the research group led by Rainer Blatt at the Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck may provide some insight.