Almost every study of food production over the last decade has claimed it has implications for global warming, but in reality the resources required to grow food and raise livestock and grains vary dramatically depending on the animal, the type of food it provides, the kind of feed it consumes and where it lives.

It's not well known but astronomers actually cannot see what our Galaxy, the Milky Way, really looks like. We are on the inside looking out so scientists instead deduce its shape by observation of its stars and their distances from us. 

In the 1950s, astronomers used radio telescopes to map our Galaxy. Their observations focused on clouds of gas in the Milky Way in which new stars are born, revealing four major arms. More recently, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope scoured the Galaxy for infrared light emitted by stars but in 2008 it was announced that Spitzer imaging had found about 110 million stars, yet only evidence of two spirals. Did the Milky Way have missing arms? Were they ever there?

Consumers who buy organic products do not want synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, microbials or antioxidants in their food - they only want natural carcinogens - but that is a recipe for disaster and a key reason why so many foodborne outbreaks are related to organic products.

Recently, scientists have begun to make precise genetic modifications to genes in order to move a beneficial effect of one plant to another. This is not without controversy but far superior to prior methods of optimizing plant biology.

The most random thing that can happen is letting natural radioactivity within DNA alter chemical compounds, providing a new pathway for genetic mutation.

After a series of media stories about the Liverpool Care Pathway being systematic malnutrition, dehydration and premature death in patients across a wide age-range, it was subjected to review by a panel which delivered their findings on 15 July 2013 saying that
the Liverpool Care Pathway
needed to abandon its name, as well as the use of the word "pathway", and that the
the Liverpool Care Pathway
should be replaced within 12 months by an "end of life care plan". 

Irradiation using light in the blue spectra has proven to have powerful bacteria-killing ability in laboratory studies using human and animal tissues.  

In a Neuron paper,
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
post-doctoral fellow Alejandro Pernía-Andrade and Professor Peter Jonas outline the synaptic mechanisms underlying oscillations at the dentate gyrus, the main entrance of the hippocampus).

Building on that work, the researchers suggest a role for these oscillations in the coding of information by the dentate gyrus principal neurons. 

An international team has published a major list of celestial X-ray sources in the Astrophysical Journal - over 150,000 high-energy stars and galaxies.

Using the X-ray telescope on board the US/UK/Italian Swift satellite, the team analyzed eight years' worth of data to make the first Swift X-ray Point Source catalogue. In addition to providing the positions of almost a hundred thousand previously unknown X-ray sources, the team have also analyzed the X-ray variability and X-ray colors of the sources in order to help to understand the origin of their emission, and to help in the classification of rare and exotic objects.

All of the data, including light curves and spectra are available online.

New series of webinars on Earth observations and the water cycle – Check details at the end of this article.

Astronomers recently took precise measurements of the closest pair of failed stars to the Sun, the binary brown dwarf system WISE J104915.57-531906.1, and the results suggest that the system harbors a third, planetary-mass object.

Failed stars are known as brown dwarfs and have a mass below 8% of the mass of the Sun—not massive enough to burn hydrogen in their centers. This particular system, Luhman 16AB, was discovered earlier this year and is only 6.6 light-years away.