50,000 years ago, the Arctic tundra was not as drab as you might think, being an Ice Age - it was filled with colorful wildflowers and these wildflowers helped sustain woolly mammoths and other giant grazing animals, according to a new paper. The study challenges the view that the arctic landscape in the ice age was largely grasslands. 

The study looked at 50,000 years of arctic vegetation history to understand how fauna had changed with animals and humans. Historically, the belief has been that the ice age's landscape was covered by largely grass-dominated systems -- called steppe. These grasses were replaced by mosses and other boggy vegetation when the ice age ended nearly 10,000 years ago, Craine said.

A lot of coffee is grown on and around Kilimanjaro, which towers almost 20,000 feet in the air. 

The most traditional form of cultivation can be found in the gardens of the Chagga people. In some areas, coffee trees and other crop plants still grow in the shade of banana trees but most coffee is grown on plantations, which still feature a large number of shade trees.

However, Africans reliant on coffee for income have gradually replaced legacy coffee varietals, which prefer shade, with others that are more resistant to fungi and can also grow in the sun.

Stampedes occur often, and not just in wild animal herds. Previously, physicists developed numerous models of crowd evacuation dynamics based on disasters such as the yearly Muslim Hajj or of the Love Parade disaster in Germany in 2010.

If crowd dynamics models were used for evacuation routes in those casualties, they weren't very good. A new study in EPJ B outlines a procedure for quantitatively comparing different crowd models, which also helps to compare these models with real-world data.

Wal-Mart caters to people with less money and there has long been a link between poverty and crime.

Criminologists have instead taken the additional step of implicating Wal-Mart in crime rates.

Communities across the United States saw decline in crime during the 1990s. Some said it was due to more abortions, others due to more police and a society less willing to coddle criminals. Scott Wolfe, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, and David Pyrooz, assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Sam Houston State University, write in the British Journal of Criminology, says it had to do with Wal-Mart not being there. 

A drug given to pregnant mice with models of autism prevents autistic behavior in their offspring, according to a new report, and though the drug could not be administered prenatally in humans - there is no way to screen for autism in human fetuses - clinical trials of this drug administered later in development, in young children who have already developed autistic symptoms, have showm promise. 

The causes of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, are complex and not well understood.

Researchers have discovered an unusual bacterial protein that attaches to virtually any antibody and prevents it from binding to its target. Protein M, as it is called, probably helps some bacteria evade the immune response and establish long-term infections.

If follow-up studies confirm Protein M's ability to defeat the antibody response, it is likely to become a target of new antibacterial therapies. The protein's unique ability to bind generally to antibodies also should make it a valuable tool for research and drug development.