The influence of aerosols and clouds represent one of the largest known uncertainties in the scientific understanding of trends in our past global climate - and also hinder predictions of future climate change.

Researchers have now shown that the rate of condensation of water on organic aerosol particles in the atmosphere can be very slow, taking many hours for a particle to change in size. This could have significant consequences for understanding how clouds are formed, affecting climate.

Aerosols are small particles less than 1 micrometer in diameter and clouds are liquid droplets of 1–1,000 micrometers in diameter. 

If you want to understand the larger spatial patterns and timing of drought in the arid and semiarid areas of the American West, you will need to look at tree ring and oxygen isotope data.

Estimates of past precipitation are made from proxies like tree rings, which can record amounts of precipitation and temperature. But tree rings are better at recording what happens during the spring and summer, when the tree is growing, than in the winter when the tree is not. To people outside science, the fact that they do not provide the same information on past precipitation is a concern, but the differing results are a good thing to geologists.

Dinosaurs are starting to look less and less like they were portrayed decades ago. The fossil of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, which lived around 150 million years ago, is the first evidence of feathered theropod dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds.  

Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers but feathering had only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rex and birds.

Robbing the LHC experiments of media attention for 41 hours, the CDF and DZERO experiments are presenting today the results of their searches of the Higgs boson in the full datasets of proton-antiproton collisions acquired in the course of the last 10 years. You can follow the live streaming of the Tevatron seminar at this link.

UPDATE: the live streaming is here.

Below I will give some introductory notions on Higgs physics at the Tevatron; at the bottom of this post I am discussing the actual results.

Introduction

Want to lower your risk of developing the most common form of skin cancer, basal cell carcinoma? Drink more coffee, says a new study. 

Basal cell carcinoma is the form of skin cancer most commonly diagnosed in the United States. Even though it is slow-growing, it causes considerable morbidity and places a burden on health care systems.

The researchers generated their results by conducting a prospective analysis of data from the Nurses' Health Study, a large and long-running study to aid in the investigation of factors influencing women's health, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, an analogous study for men. 

Even if you are not aware of everything you take in, your eyes are sending visual information to your brain.  This unconscious seeing is evidenced in a phenomenon called "blindsight", where people have no awareness, but their brains can see - even in subjects with visual impairment, caused by damage to a part of the brain called the visual cortex. 

Researchers have created "Huntington's Disease in a dish" by generating stem cells from skin cells obtained from a person with a severe, early-onset form of Huntington's disease  and turned them into neurons that degenerate just like those affected by the fatal inherited disorder.

Materials scientists at Harvard have demonstrated a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that converts hydrogen into electricity but can also store electrochemical energy like a battery. This fuel cell can continue to produce power for a short time after its fuel has run out.

The finding in Nano Letters will be most important for small-scale, portable energy applications, where a very compact and lightweight power supply is essential and the fuel supply may be interrupted.

 A phase II interferon-free combination study with TMC435 and daclatasvir will evaluate treatment-naive or previous null responder patients with HCV genotype 1a and 1b - The study will include approx. 180 patients and will evaluate a combination of TMC435 and daclatasvir, with or without Ribavirin, in four different cohorts for 12 or 24 weeks of treatment 

 Medivir AB announced that a phase II combination study with the investigational compound TMC435 and Bristol-Myers Squibb's investigational compound daclatasvir will start in July. 

Today you'll find a myriad of different Earth observation systems covering all from local to global areas, collected from sub-sea to ground to air and of course space. Providers of these Earth observation services come from both public and private sector. Some of the collected data are required through national regulations while others are in demand because of global challenges such as climate change etc. The need for Earth observations permeates the entire global society.

Answering this need for Earth observation capacity several Earth observation systems have been built.