Never 'heard' of thundersnow?  It's a rare sort of thunderstorm but the precipitation is snow rather than rain and because the snow dampens the sound so while you might  thunder from a typical storm miles away  the boom of thundersnow can only be heard for a few hundred yards.

Patrick Market, associate professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri, is chasing storms in the dead of winter in order to release weather balloons that will produce data about the little-known phenomenon of thundersnow and he says it can teach us a lot about predicting weather.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute say their new polarization-matched type of light emitting diode (LED)  has significantly improved lighting performance and energy efficiency.

Sometimes we talk about a water shortage but it's really more of an energy shortage.    Less than 2% of the water on Earth can be consumed but with cheaper energy the water availability, even in remote areas, is unlimited.   

But if cheap energy isn't on its way any time soon, energy efficient water purification is a good interim step.     Engineered osmosis could be a key to addressing the global need for affordable clean water, according to two Yale researchers.
 

A 2000-year-old painted statue is being restored to her original glory by scientists from Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG),  an academic department of the University of Warwick, along with the University of Southampton and the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

Individuals who get less than seven hours of sleep per night appear about three times as likely to develop respiratory illness following exposure to a cold virus as those who sleep eight hours or more, according to a report in the January 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Studies have demonstrated that sleep deprivation impairs some immune function, according to background information in the article. Research indicates that those who sleep approximately seven to eight hours per night have the lowest rates of heart disease illness and death. However, there has previously been little direct evidence that poor sleep increases susceptibility to the common cold.

Two new studies show that commonly prescribed forms of postmenopausal hormone therapy may slightly accelerate the loss of brain tissue in women 65 and older beyond what normally occurs with aging. 

The studies' findings appear as companion papers in the Jan. 13 issue of Neurology. Both papers report on analyses from the Women's Health Initiative Memory Study, a substudy of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) landmark Women's Health Initiative (WHI) hormone therapy clinical trials.