The climate is complex and nothing shows that more than when numerical models are forced to stop predicting the past and have to actually project what could happen in the future.

But the past can at least inform if models are really wrong and an analysis of fossil corals and mollusk shells from the Pacific Ocean reveals there is no link between the strength of seasonal differences and El Niño, a complex but irregular climate pattern with large impacts on weather - but the top nine climate models in use today simplistically associate exceptionally hot summers and cold winters with weak El Niños, and vice versa.

Taste buds vary widely in humans, which is one reason why some kids prefer sweet or salty treats and others do not, but it may also be the reason that some kids need more sugar to get that same sweet taste.  

Conventional measures of age usually define people as 'old' at one chronological age, often 65. In many countries around the world, age 65 is used as a cutoff for everything from pension age to health care systems, as the basis of a demographic measure known as the 'old-age dependency ratio,' which defines everyone over 65 as depending on the population between ages 20 and 65.

In new study in the journal Population and Development Review, IIASA researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide new measures to replace the old-age dependency ratio.

A leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer is famously resistant to treatment. There are many reasons for this, but one has to do with a group of persisting cancer cells in the colon that cause relapses. Conventional therapies against them are mostly ineffective. EPFL scientists have now identified a biological mechanism that can be exploited to counteract colon cancer relapses. The approach activates a protein that is lost in the persisting cancer cells. The researchers were able to reactivate it using vitamin A, thus eliminating the cancer cells and preventing metastasis. The study is published in Cancer Cell, and introduces a new way to treat colon cancer.

When you think of it, all of the natural gas harvested by hydraulic fracturing is natural but groups that once embraced it as clean energy have now turned on it and have sought to use its biological origins against it, with manufactured videos of flaming tap water and such that have nothing to do with fracking.

Scientists revealed mayor players in the severe muscle damage caused by sepsis, or septicemia, which explains why many patients suffer debilitating muscle impairment long-term after recovery. They propose a therapeutic approach based on mesenchymal stem cell transplantation, which has produced encouraging results and has proved successful in restoring muscle capacity in animals.

Galaxy clusters are massive congregations of galaxies that host huge reservoirs of hot gas -- the temperatures are so high that X-rays are produced. These structures are useful to astronomers because their construction is believed to be influenced by the Universe's notoriously strange components -- dark matter and dark energy. By studying their properties at different stages in the history of the Universe, galaxy clusters can shed light on the Universe's poorly understood dark side.

The amygdala, a small structure at the front end of the brain's temporal lobe, has long been associated with negative behaviors generally, and specifically with fear. But new research shows this collection of nuclei can also influence positive social functions like kindness and what might be called charitable giving in humans. 

  

Marumi Kado started his talk by saying he will only present new results based on the full 2015 13 TeV pp collision dataset.
For Run 2 there have been a large number of improvements to the detector.

Also the trigger has been improved, with a new central trigger processor. Reconstruction software also was improved significantly. 

Marumi spent a long time describing the retuning of the detector and the performance in reconstruction of impact parameters, physics objects, and the like. The physics modellinghas been verified in several control samples of dibosons, top pairs, etcetera.

Marumi shows that the Higgs signals in ATLAS are wanting. 0.7 sigma observed in 4-lepton mode, expected 2.8 sigma. Similar story in diphotons.

Though politicians in Paris cheering a climate accord that 150 out of the 200 countries present have no intention of honoring is getting all of the attention, a more pressing concern is being ignored: a Zombie apocalypse.

Tara Smith, Associate Professor at Kent State University in Ohio says in the Christmas issue of The BMJ(1) that emerging zombie infections have been identified around the globe and, though sporadic, are becoming a source of greater concern to the medical and public health community.