The Black Sea sediment record has a terrific variety of past plankton species that left behind their genetic makeup - the plankton paleome.

The semi-isolated Black Sea is highly sensitive to climate driven environmental changes, and the underlying sediments represent high-resolution archives of past continental climate and concurrent hydrologic changes in the basin. The brackish Black Sea is currently receiving salty Mediterranean waters via the narrow Strait of Bosphorus as well as freshwater from rivers and via precipitation.

A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound  known as Mount Sharp is not evidence of a massive lake but might be the result of the Red Planet's famously dusty atmosphere, a new analysis has found. If correct, the research dilutes expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water and ideas about past habitability.

You've seen it on television; a rich, older man who supports a younger, attractive spouse. And it happens in real life, but it's rare.

Instead, a new analysis by economists has found that people married to much younger or much older mates have lower average earnings, lower cognitive abilities, are less educated and even less attractive than couples of similar ages.

British Radar in WW2 -  by Sir Robert Watson-Watt

I am pleased to be able to publish here in my blog a historical document of some importance: a short history of radar by Sir Robert Watson-Watt.  The document - reproduced below these introductory comments - includes some information and images which have not, to the best of my knowledge, been published before on the internet.  Of special interest to historians is the

first photographic record of radiolocation of aircraft, made on the 24th of July, 1935. 

Hawaii does not get a lot of hurricanes, only two have made landfall in the last 30 years.

But scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa predict that Hawaii could see a two-to-three-fold increase in tropical cyclones by 2075.

How worried should Hawaii residents get?

With the Higgs boson in the bag, the game called "global fit" that particle physicists have been playing for a couple of decades has changed significantly. The knowledge of the Higgs boson mass provided by the measurements obtained by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, added to dozens of  other measurements of critical observable properties of subatomic particles that have been measured at LEP/SLC, LEPII, the Tevatron, and the LHC itself, allow us to constrain some of the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model more than direct experimental determinations do.

But what the heck is a global fit ?

The World Is Getting Cooler*

*  Not!

This is something of a pre-emptive strike against the quote miners of this world.  I predict that they will use a new study of cloud seeding to sell ice damage insurance or something.

If you sprinkle a cup of water on a bonfire it will have a tiny cooling effect.  It will not put out the fire or wishomagically reverse the heating effect.  Scientists know exactly what they mean by a cooling effect, and so does everyone who ever used a cooling fan in summer.  But there are some snake oil salesmen who want to convince you that a simple cooling fan can lower the air temperature.

Bullying and violence are the latest cultural magnet for administrators in schools around the country, but the solution may not be paid commercials, more books or talks in the gym - it may be as simple as embracing team sports again.

At the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C., researchers discussed their analysis of data from the 2011 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey to see if athletic participation was associated with violence-related behaviors, including fighting, carrying a weapon and being bullied. A representative sample of 1,820 high school students in the state completed the survey, which also asked adolescents whether they played any school-sponsored team sports (e.g., football) or individual sports (e.g. track).

Natural emissions and man-made pollutants have an unexpected effect; they make clouds brighter and have a cooling effect on the world's climate.

A quick primer: Clouds are made of water droplets, condensed on to tiny particles suspended in the air. When the air is humid enough, the particles swell into cloud droplets. It has been known for some decades that the number of these particles and their size control how bright the clouds appear from the top, controlling the efficiency with which clouds scatter sunlight back into space. A major challenge for climate science has been trying to understand and quantify these effects, which have a major impact in polluted regions.

Researchers were able to controll seizures in epileptic mice with a one-time transplantation of medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells into the hippocampus, which inhibit signaling in overactive nerve circuits.

Cell therapy has become a focus of epilepsy research, in part because current medications, even when effective, only control symptoms and not underlying causes of the disease, according to Scott C. Baraban, PhD of UC San Francisco, who led the new study. In many types of epilepsy, he said, current drugs have no therapeutic value at all.