Satellite observations of the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic haven't been around long enough, and prior methods were too inaccurate, to be able to say whether the loss of ice today will persist in the future.

Predictions of the contribution of both ice shields to the sea level by the year 2100 may be off by more than 35 centimeters - but whether they will be too high or too low is unclear. Too high is obviously no problem. Too low could be a real worry.

A 'rather bizarre' result using a robotic frog and recorded mating call may provide insight into how complex traits evolve by hooking together much simpler traits.

Researchers have discovered that two wrong mating calls can make a right for female túngara frogs. It's not a defect in the frog brain, but an example of how well frogs have evolved to extract meaning from noise, much the way humans have. 

The best way to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change is through the use of a European-style cap-and-trade scheme, according to a paper by business school scholars.  

Certain sections of strike-slip faults, known as restraining bends, are sites of unusual tectonic activity because they undergo more contractional motion than surrounding areas.

These bends can be the site of major contraction-dominated earthquakes that are difficult to characterize using traditional means. Over millions of years, these earthquakes build substantial mountain ranges, such as the site of the present study, the Santa Cruz Mountains, California.

Baseball players who have undergone ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) surgery have able to return to the same or higher level of competition for an extended period of time, according to results presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Chicago. 

Lake Qinghai is the largest interior plateau lake in North China and has long been sensitive to climate change and the environmental effects of Tibetan Plateau uplift. 

Long, continuous, terrestrial lacustrine sedimentary records are extremely rare but an almost continuous 626 m long sediment core of ancient Lake Qinghai have been obtained from an in-filled part of the southern lake basin, which documents both the age of the origin of the lake and the evolution of the East Asian monsoon during the Late Cenozoic.

The end-Permian mass extinction is the most severe biodiversity crisis in the history of life. 

Immediately after the extinction, many marine taxa suffered a dramatic size reduction (i.e., the 'Lilliput Effect') and compiled data show that recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction was not a smooth process but included several episodes of environmental disturbance and three further episodes of extinction.

The third episode of extinction occurs near the Smithian/Spathian boundary (SSB), around 1.8 million years after the end-Permian extinction and was recently associated to an episode of extreme warmth - true global warming. 

Biotechnology company Quantec Ltd has presented the results of its US clinical trial of its patented complex of bioactive milk proteins product - called IDP - which was conducted at clinical research facility in California and completed in February of 2013.

IDP was the active ingredient in a specially formulated skin cream that went head-to-head in a double blind study against a premium, US-based clinical brand of acne treatment cream (containing 2% salicylic acid plus retinal). Results were presented at the New Zealand Dermatological Society Annual Meeting in Coolum, Australia last week.  

RXi Pharmaceuticals Corporation, an RNA-targeted technologies company, today announced positive results from their second placebo-controlled Phase 1 study with RXI‑109, an sd-rxRNA compound that targets Connective Tissue Growth Factor (CTGF), and is being developed for the treatment of abnormal dermal scars such as hypertrophic scars and keloids in conjunction with scar revision surgery.

In this study, subjects received small skin incisions in their abdomen and were treated with 3 intradermal doses of RXI‑109 over a 2-week period. This dose escalating study consisted of 3 cohorts of 3 healthy volunteers each. Subjects received RXI‑109 on one side of the abdomen, and placebo on the other side.

A new paper has been published regarding the significance of 2D:4D (the length ratios of the 2nd (index finger) and 4th (ring finger).

A joint research team from the Kochi Branch of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation), the Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University and the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Japan, measured the finger lengths of 142 Japanese professional sumo wrestlers :