Deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before atmospheric CO2, ruling out the greenhouse gas as the driver of the meltdown, says a new study.

“There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change,” said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, published in Science. “You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages.”

Stott is an expert in paleoclimatology and was a reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ). He also recently co-authored a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tracing a 900-year history of monsoon variability in India.

A new study by Norwegian researchers investigating how cancer influences divorce found that most types of cancer resulted in a slight decrease in the divorce rate in the first few years following the diagnosis - except cervical or testicular cancer.

The somewhat double-edged good news: the study found that divorce was least likely to occur when the cancer had spread or for types of cancer that have a poor prognosis, and more likely in cancers with a good chance of recovery.

In other words, your spouse is more likely to stick it out if you're going to die anyway.

The research, which compared the divorce rates of 215,000 cancer survivors with those among couples with no cancer over a period of about 17 years, revealed that women who developed cervical cancer were 40 percent more lik

An international team of researchers has determined there was a "whiff" of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago, the earliest time any significant amount of oxygen has been detected on Earth. Up to now, scholars believed oxygen levels on Earth were negligible before the "Great Oxidation Event" (GOE) about 2.3 to 2.4 billion years ago.

This latest discovery indicates there was at least a little oxygen in Earth's atmosphere 50 to 100 million years before the GOE. It also provides scholars with more information to help them solve the mystery of the origins of oxygen on Earth.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer and its unique ability to see small details, astronomers have uncovered a flat, nearly edge-on disc of silicates in the heart of the magnificent Ant Nebula. The disc seems, however, too 'skinny' to explain how the nebula got its intriguing ant-like shape.

The Ant Nebula is located about 5 000 light-years away. The central star is as bright as 10,000 Suns and has a temperature of 35, 000 degrees Celsius. It is the last phase before this solar-like star will become a white dwarf.

The Ant Nebula is one of the most striking planetary nebulae known.

The H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus can pass through the placenta of pregnant women to the unborn fetus, and can infect organs other than the lungs in adults.

Professor Jiang Gu, Peking University, Beijing, China and colleagues studied post-mortem tissues of two adults – one man and one pregnant woman, and also tested the dead fetus of the dead woman. They investigated how H5N1 – an emerging infectious disease which causes respiratory symptoms and a high fatality rate – affects different organs in the body.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a very common chronic illness that affects around 1% of people in developed countries. It is caused by an abnormal immune reaction to various tissues within the body. As well as affecting joints and causing an inflammatory arthritis, it can also affect many other organs of the body.

A paper published this week in the open access journal PLoS Medicine provides strong evidence that one specific part of the genome is associated with rheumatoid arthritis.

Rene Toes and colleagues from Leiden University Medical Center, the Karolinska Institute, and Celera studied four groups of patients and matched controls.