If you live in an arid region, you know keeping it green is an environmentally stressful activity. But some arid regions have been getting greener on their own and scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.

A study of arid regions around the globe looked into the potential of a "fertilization effect" of   carbon dioxide and found that it has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.

How can paying less for energy cost more? When activists advocating their technology start doing math.

The EU paid 406 billion Euros for oil and gas imports in 2012 (1.1 billion Euros per day), 3.2% of its GDP, notes the European Wind Energy Association. If Europeans simply paid more to increase domestic wind power, it would increase Europe's competitiveness, they say.  Cheaper fossil fuels undermine Europe by not being cheap enough, the result of increasing fossil fuel import costs.

"The massively increasing prices for fossil fuels over the last ten years - crude oil by 14% a year, gas 10% and coal 8% - are the real danger for Europe's competitiveness", said Thomas Becker , Chief Executive Officer of the EWEA in Brussels.

[The title of this article comes from a T-shirt with ten advices on what to do when everything else fails]

It has always surprised me to realize how confident we physicists are of the good faith of our colleagues. We may argue endlessly over one graph or result, getting to the point of publically casting doubts on the dexterity or intelligence of our peers (yes, I've seen that), but we never seem to doubt -privately or otherwise- their scientific integrity.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has lifted the clinical hold previously placed on a proposed Phase II study of SparVax, a next generation recombinant anthrax vaccine, PharmAthene, Inc. announced.

The clinical hold was enacted in August 2012, prior to the commencement of a proposed Phase II clinical trial of SparVax. In its notification to the Company, the FDA requested that PharmAthene provide additional stability data for both its engineering and GMP lots of U.S. manufactured Final Drug Product, as well as additional information about the intended stability indicating assays. 

Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be its closest to Earth on Friday at 1:59 p.m. Pacific time. At 1.7 miles wide it is one of the larger asteroids to swing by Earth - about the size of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Luckily,  Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be a comfortable 3.6 million miles away.

Astronomical bonus: it even has its own moon, a smaller rock circling it that is about about 2,000 feet wide.

A sequence of radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 was obtained on the evening of May 29, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth, which is 15.6 lunar distances.

The itch sensation is triggered by two categories of itch-inducing agents: histamine (involving the histamine receptor) and non-histamine (involving a Mas-like G-protein coupled receptor). While the molecular distinction is crucial for developing effective treatments for the specific forms of itch sensation, it remains unclear as to how the two forms of itch sensations are encoded in the sensory system. A heavily debated school of thought suggests that itch sensation, in response to either histamine and non-histamine inducers, is differentially triggered by distinct populations of sensory neurons, although such model has never been proven.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), known to deplete ozone, are also to blame for global warming since the 1970s, according to a paper in the International Journal of Modern Physics B.

The statistical analysis found that CFCs are the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which the author says would explain why temperature has not continued to rise as CO2 has - CFCs have gone down a lot.

Marijuana became popular as a recreational drug and as its legalization movement became more popular, studies were conducted on its therapeutic properties. Medical cannabis is often used by sufferers of chronic ailments, including cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder, to combat pain, insomnia, lack of appetite, and other symptoms. But self-reported milder symptoms often claim that only marijuana helps. Women have 50% of prescription-level pain, for example, but men have gotten 80% of the 'medical marijuana' cards, so objective data is lacking.

A naturally occurring protein, diazepam binding inhibitor (DBI) , secreted only in discrete areas of the mammalian brain may act as a Valium-like brake on certain types of epileptic seizures.

 Valium, which is notoriously addictive, prone to abuse and dangerous at high doses, was an early drug treatment for epilepsy, but it has fallen out of use for this purpose because its efficacy quickly wears off and because newer, better anti-epileptic drugs have come along.

Researchers writing in Neuron say DBI calms the rhythms of a key brain circuit and so could prove valuable in developing novel, less side-effect-prone therapies not only for epilepsy but possibly for anxiety and sleep disorders.