Monitoring Earth's rising greenhouse gas levels will require a global data collection network 10 times larger than the one currently in place in order to quantify regional progress in emission reductions, according to a new research commentary by University of Colorado and NOAA researchers appearing in the April 25 issue of Science.

The authors, CU-Boulder Research Associate Melinda Marquis and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Pieter Tans, said with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations now at 385 parts per million and rising, the need for improved regional greenhouse gas measurements is critical. While the current observation network can measure CO2 fluxes on a continental scale, charting regional emissions where significant mitigation efforts are underway -- like California, New England and European countries -- requires a more densely populated network, they said.

Birds, unlike mammals, lack a tissue that is specialized to generate heat. A team of researchers at New York Medical College writes that the same lack of heat-generating tissue may have contributed to the extinction of ... dinosaurs.

Humans, like all mammals, have two kinds of adipose tissue, white fat and brown fat. White fat is used for storing energy-rich fuels, while brown fat generates heat. Hibernating bears have a lot of brown fat, as do human infants, who have much more than adults, relative to their body size. Infants’ brown fat protects them from hypothermia. Clinicians would like to find ways of making adult white fat behave more like brown fat so that we could burn, rather than store, energy.

While most mammals have a key gene called UCP1, which is responsible for the heat-generation function of brown fat, birds do not. The researchers found they could induce a specific type of stem cell in chicken embryos to produce differentiated cells that are structured and behave like brown fat. These chicken cells can even activate a UCP1 gene if presented with one from a mouse.

At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics. The leading theory says the particles are accelerated by tightly-twisted magnetic fields close to the black hole, but confirming that idea required an elusive close-up view of the jet's inner throat. Now, using the unrivaled resolution of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers have watched material winding a corkscrew outward path and behaving exactly as predicted by the theory.

In 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru put a large amount of sulfur into the atmosphere. Sulfur reacts with water in the air to form droplets of sulfuric acid, which cool the planet by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface.

The droplets soon fall back to Earth, so the cooling effects lasted only a year or so, but the global impact on human society was much greater, according to a new study of contemporary records by geologists at UC Davis.
N
o one had looked at the agricultural and social impacts, said Ken Verosub, professor of geology at UC Davis. "We knew it was a big eruption, we knew it was a cold year, and that's all we knew."

It's been thought that very preterm babies were not developed enough to benefit from 'comfort strategies but research published today in BMC Pediatrics suggests that even babies born between 28 and 31 weeks could benefit from skin-to-skin cuddling with their mother before and during painful procedures, such as a heel lance.

Celeste Johnston of McGill University, Montreal, Canada and colleagues have already shown that skin-to-skin contact, known as kangaroo mother care (KMC) helps babies born at 32 to 36 weeks to recover from pain.

A much-discussed idea to offset global warming by injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere would have a drastic impact on Earth's protective ozone layer, new research concludes. The study, led by Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), warns that such an approach might delay the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by decades and cause significant ozone loss over the Arctic.

The study will be published Thursday in Science Express. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR's principal sponsor, as well as by NASA and European funding agencies.

"Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet could have perilous side effects," Tilmes says. "While climate change is a major threat, more research is required before society attempts global geoengineering solutions."