A new study of  most of the world's tropical land area indicates that urbanization and globalized agricultural trade have become the primary drivers of tropical deforestation, in stark contrast to the assumptions of some scientists that fast-growing urbanization and the efficiencies of global trade might eventually slow or reverse tropical deforestation. The new study appeared recently in Nature Geoscience.

Deforestation has been a rising concern in recent decades, especially with the recognition that it may exacerbate climate change. Studies in the late 20th century generally matched it with growing rural populations, as new roads were built into forests and land was cleared for subsistence agriculture.

It seems that everything except the causes of childhood obesity receive blame for childhood obesity. While common sense and plenty of research indicate that parents and social setting are the primary influences on children's eating habits, the effort to pin the problem on food manufactures never ends. Recently, the authors of a study in Pediatrics continued the charade by suggesting that product placement in movies may bear some of the responsibility for the expanding waistlines of America's Children.

Previously unrelated disorders which all cause complex defects in brain development and function are linked by a common underlying mechanism. Rett syndrome (RTT), Cornelia de Lange syndrome (CdLS), Alpha-Thalassemia mental Retardation, and X-linked syndrome (ATR-X) have each been linked with distinct abnormalities in chromatin, the spools of proteins and DNA that make up chromosomes and control how genetic information is read in a cell.

The new research, appearing in Developmental Cell, helps to explain why these different chromatin abnormalities all interfere with proper gene expression patterns necessary for normal development and mature brain function.

It’s Valentine Day, and children everywhere celebrated friendship and love by giving cards and candy to their friends. In what alien observers must consider one of the most bizarre human customs, these same children were asked to draw lewd pictures of human private parts. You don’t think you or your children participated in this custom? Take a look a the figure below…

One of the positive side-effects of preparing a seminar is being forced to get up-to-date with the latest experimental and theoretical developments on the topic. And this is of particular benefit to lazy bums like myself, who prefer to spend their time playing online chess than reading arxiv preprints.

It happened last week, in the course of putting together a meaningful discussion of the state of the art in global electroweak fits to standard model observables, and their implications for the unknown mass of the Higgs boson: by skimming the hep-ph folder I found a very recent paper by a colleague in Padova, which I had shamefully failed to notice in the last couple of careless visits.