The "green seed problem" is a long-standing issue that causes millions of dollars annually in canola crop losses for Canada.

Canola is the major cash crop in Alberta, which produces about 35 per cent of Canada's canola that generates in the province about $5 billion in revenue annually. Across the country, the oilseed crop, whose seeds are pressed into canola oil, contributes about $15 billion a year to the Canadian economy.

However, every year around the time when canola matures, an unpredictable touch of a light frost can damage crop quality and cause severe losses. The discovery of a plant gene regulatory network means plants could be genetically enhanced to prevent green seeds from occurring in mature canola.

A review panel has concluded that the mass stranding of approximately 100 melon-headed whales in the Loza Lagoon system in northwest Madagascar in 2008 was primarily triggered by acoustic stimuli - a multi-beam echosounder system operated by a survey vessel contracted by ExxonMobil Exploration and Production (Northern Madagascar) Limited.

In response to the event and with assistance from The International Fund for Animal Welfare and Wildlife Conservation Society led an international stranding team to help return live whales from the lagoon system to the open sea, and to conduct necropsies on dead whales to determine the cause of death.

 Akawaio penak,  a previously unknown genus of thin, eel-like electric fish, was discovered in the shallow, murky waters of the upper Mazaruni River is northern Guyana.
University of Toronto Scarborough professor Nathan Lovejoy.

While America has drastically reduced its greenhouse gas emissions - CO2 from energy is back at early 1990s levels and emissions from coal are back at early 1980s levels - that isn't good enough for many environmentalists. Meanwhile, China is setting the stage to offset all of the greenhouse emissions cuts by the rest of the world while claiming they lead in clean energy.

If you began to travel to the star nearest to us after ol' Sol, named Alpha Centauri, it takes about four light years.  

Now imagine there were instead 10,000 other stars crammed into that 25 trillion miles of space rather than none - that's the kind of density of a galaxy that was recently discovered.

New evidence suggests than no continental ice sheet formed during the Late Cretaceous Period more than 90 million years ago, when the climate was much warmer than it is today, though it has been commonly believed to have happened that way. 

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. Though less than one percent of the general population meet the criteria, the rate of psychopathy in prisons is around 23%. 

As you might suspect, psychopaths don't much care when people are in pain. 

A new paper using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on the brains of 121 inmates of a medium-security prison in the USA finds that in psychopaths, the brain areas necessary for feeling empathy and concern for others fail to become active and be connected to other important regions involved in affective processing and decision-making. 

A new study finds that a 'microbial clock' may help forensic scientists who are attempting to determine the time of death in cases involving human corpses. 

The 'clock' in this instance is essentially the lock-step succession of bacterial changes that occur postmortem as bodies move through the decay process, much like estimates used to be made involving knowledge of rigor mortis.

Currently, investigators use tools ranging from the timing of last text messages and corpse temperatures to insect infestations on bodies and "grave soil" analyses, with varying results. And the more days that elapse following a person's demise, the more difficult it becomes to determine the time of death with any significant accuracy. 

Deep earthquakes occur where the oceanic lithosphere, driven by tectonics, plunges under continental plates – examples are off the coasts of the western United States, Russia and Japan.

Some new research is a step toward replicating the full power of these earthquakes to learn what sets them off and how they unleash their violence and was made possible only by the construction of a one-of-a-kind X-ray facility that can replicate high-pressure and high-temperature while allowing scientists to peer deep into material to trace the propagation of cracks and shock waves.

Galaxy Zoo 2, the second phase of a crowdsourcing effort to categorize galaxies in our universe, has leveraged more than 83,000 citizen scientists to obtain over 16 million galaxy classifications and information on more than 300,000 galaxies.

That's what you get when you ask the public for help in learning more about our universe.  Computers are good at automatically measuring properties such as size and color of galaxies, but more challenging characteristics, such as shape and structure, can only be determined by the human eye.