An experiment, carried out from a stratospheric balloon floating 35 km above the Brazilian jungle, to validate one of the instruments operating on the meteorological satellite MetOp was also used to support preparations for the candidate Earth Explorer TRAQ mission.
 

ESA’s global land cover map, which is ten times sharper than any previous global satellite map, is now available to the public online from the GlobCover website. It is the highest resolution land cover map that has been completely validated ever released.
 
Sixteen experts validated the map using more than 3 000 reference land cover points and showed it had an overall accuracy of 73% weighted by area for its 22 land cover classes. The map’s legend was developed using the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Land Cover Classification System (LCCS).  
 

Teenage sexuality spiked in the 1970s and 1980s and then began to decline.   Part of the reason is targeting alcohol, drugs and smoking.  It turns out that while sexual behavior can vary considerably among teens, nonsexual risk behaviors are similar among them, according to study findings from the Journal of Adolescent Health .

Almost anything can be considered colloquially 'addictive' if you like it enough - computer games, Reese's Peant Butter Cups, reading Scientific Blogging articles and the best science blogs on the planet.

Clinical addiction is another issue, though, and Princeton University Professor Bart Hoebel and his team in the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute say they have evidence that sugar can be an addictive substance, wielding its power over the brains of lab animals in a manner similar to many drugs of abuse.

So now sugar addiction can overtake "I have a thyroid condition" as the number one  excuse obese people use in America.

Earthquakes have aftershocks — not just the geological kind but the mental kind as well. Just like veterans of war, earthquake survivors can experience post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. 

In 1988, a massive earthquake in Armenia killed 17,000 people and destroyed nearly half the town of Gumri. Now, in the first multigenerational study of its kind, UCLA researchers studying survivors of that catastrophe have discovered that vulnerability to PTSD, anxiety and depression runs in families. 

We haven't always been warming.  The circle of climate change has made 90% of the planet's history ice ages and many of those swings were sudden and dramatic.  And it could happen that way again, within decades, says a new government report.

It contends that seas could rise rapidly if melting of polar ice continues to outrun recent projections and that an ongoing drought in the U.S. west could be the start of permanent drying for the region. Commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the report was authored by researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and other leading institutions. It was released at this week's meeting of the American Geophysical Union.