A previously unknown dual mechanism slows peat decay and may help reduce carbon dioxide emissions from peatlands during times of drought, according to a new study. The naturally occurring mechanism was discovered in 5,000-year-old pocosin bogs in coastal North Carolina. Preliminary field experiments suggest it may occur in, or be exportable to, peatlands in other regions as well. 

It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces - but that was not because of a limitation of our brains. 

Instead, it's likely that even the brains of rodents get there very naturally every day.

A new study examined the relationship between mandatory nap times in daycare and children's night-time sleep duration concurrently and then 12 months later and found children who were exposed to more than 60 minutes mandatory sleep at childcare slept worse at night which continued when they started school.

A sample of 168 children, aged between 50-72 months of which 55 percent were male, was observed during the study. A year later the children were observed in their first year of school.

In a new paper, researchers address the "uncomfortably close" occurrence of the Chicxulub impact in the Yucatán and the most voluminous phase of the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruptions in India.  Specifically, the researchers argue that the impact likely triggered most of the immense eruptions of lava in India -- that it was not a coincidence but was a cause-and-effect relationship.

A large study examined the impact of growth in Medicare's hospice benefit among nursing home residents between 2004 and 2009 and found improvement in indicators of care quality, such as less reliance on intensive care and feeding tubes, but that came with increased costs to Medicare of $6,761 per patient on average.

Early in the history of the Medicare hospice benefit, care was most likely to be provided by non-profit organizations, and that was how politicians sold the Medicare expansion to taxpayers - that hospice growth would save Medicare money by reducing expensive, aggressive end-of-life treatments such as hospital intensive care, because groups did it out of compassion. But once a lot of government money is involved, things change.

Many of us take a healthy immune system for granted. But for certain infants with rare, inherited mutations of certain genes, severe infection and death are stark consequences of their impaired immune responses.

Now, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have identified an important role for calcium signaling in immune responses to chronic infection resulting from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium causing tuberculosis.