Retrieving material for composting from open dumps across the developing world could reduce the environmental impact of growing mountains of waste, according to researchers in India.

People in the developing world are encouraged to compost garden waste or dispose of it in "green" garbage bins for collection and processing. In the developing world, the problems are very different. Open dumps are prevalent and have a poor environmental record, according to environmental engineer Kurian Joseph and colleagues at Anna University in Chennai, India.

Joseph's team is proposing landfill mining as a viable means of rehabilitating these open dumps.

Your mother called it 'settling.' Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young said “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Let's face it, not everyone can have their perfect mate so you have to make do.

Yet in the animal kingdom, females and males apparently have ways to compensate that increase the chance their offspring will survive even if the parents are not genetic ideals.

Patricia Adair Gowaty calls it the "Compensation Hypothesis."

Imagine turning a bad micro-organism, like E. coli, into a micro-factory that produces pharmaceutical compounds to fight aging or obesity.

University at Buffalo researchers say they can do it and have filed for a patent.

First Wave Technologies, Inc. recently received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation to focus on the biosynthesis of a popular group of flavonoids called isoflavonoids.

Observations and climate model results confirm that human-induced warming of the planet is having a pronounced effect on the atmosphere’s total moisture content.

“When you heat the planet, you increase the ability of the atmosphere to hold moisture,” said Benjamin Santer, lead author from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Program for Climate Modeling and Intercomparison. “The atmosphere’s water vapor content has increased by about 0.41 kilograms per cubic meter (kg/m²) per decade since 1988, and natural variability in climate just can’t explain this moisture change.

Phosgene is most famous for being part of the chemical arsenal used in the trenches during World War I - generals preferred it over chlorine because soldiers coughed less and therefore inhaled more. It was still stockpiled in military arsenals after the Second World War but its presence in the atmosphere today is due to man-made chlorinated hydrocarbons used in the chemical industry.

Phosgene still plays a major role in the preparation of pharmaceuticals, herbicides, insecticides, synthetic foams, resins and polymers.

Professor Peter Bernath of the Department of Chemistry at the University of York and a research team have carried out the first study of the global distribution of the gas.

An international team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope has discovered that the south pole of Neptune is much hotter than the rest of the planet. This is consistent with the fact that it is late southern summer and this region has been in sunlight for about 40 years.

The scientists are publishing the first temperature maps of the lowest portion of Neptune's atmosphere, showing that this warm south pole is providing an avenue for methane to escape out of the deep atmosphere.

"The temperatures are so high that methane gas, which should be frozen out in the upper part of Neptune's atmosphere (the stratosphere), can leak out through this region," said Glenn Orton, lead author of the paper reporting the results.