Soil erosion that occurs in rainy seasons leads to a significant amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere, a new study shows.

Investigators who analyzed 240 runoff plots from different regions of the world found that organic carbon losses from soils corresponds to about one-sixth of annual fossil fuel-induced carbon emissions with highest rates for semi-arid soils followed by tropical soils and temperate soils.

"The organic carbon lost from soils is more likely to reach the atmosphere under semi-arid sandy soils of weak structure compared to clayey tropical or temperate soils where organic matter is more protected," said Dr. Vincent Chaplot, co-author of the study published in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms.

DOI: 10.1002/esp.3758

It was recently revealed that the University of Wollongong has spent around A$20,000 over the past five years on lunches and dinners with politicians, including several fundraising events for the Liberal Party. Usually only one person attended these functions – probably someone at the top, though we don’t know for sure – but the donations themselves were made in the name of the university, thus making the university a sponsor of the Liberal Party.

A team of engineers have created tiny acoustic vortices and used them to grip and spin microscopic particles suspended in water.

The research by academics from the University of Bristol's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Northwestern Polytechnical University in China, is published in Physical Review Letters. The researchers have shown that acoustic vortices act like tornados of sound, causing microparticles to rotate and drawing them to the vortex core. Like a tornado, what happens to the particles depends strongly on their size.

Aging is associated with significant decline in cognitive functions. But does this translate into poorer decision making? Psychologists from the University of Basel and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development report that in simple decision situations, older adults perform just as well as younger adults. However, according to their study published in the academic journal Cognition, aging may affect decision performance in more complex decision situations.

Important decisions in politics and economics are often made by older people: According to Forbes magazine, the average age of the world's most powerful people in 2013 was 61 years. As populations across the globe age, the selection of older individuals into such powerful roles may even be further intensified.

Teenage girls find female CEOs and military pilots to be better role models, but they like and feel more similar to women in careers like modeling and acting, say psychologists.

For the study, 100 girls and 76 boys ages 14 to 18 were shown photographs of model Heidi Klum, actress Jennifer Aniston, CEO Carly Fiorina and military pilot Sarah Deal Burrow. Klum and Aniston represented the appearance-focused careers (Aniston probably wasn't consulted on that, since she is clearly the best actress of the "Friends" cast) and Fiorina and Deal Burrow represented the non-appearance focused careers.

Electric vehicles are all the rage for wealthy elites but they have a more practical future benefit - mass transit, assuming the electricity source is low-emission like nuclear or solar. 

Right now, things like electric buses require more cost because of the maintenance and downtime. They take huge batteries, which means when those die off and they are placed into landfills we will replace global warming with acid rain. And to match gasoline's energy density would take a battery larger than could fit on a bus. 

The solution instead has to be much faster charging times. 

Passwords have to be complicated in order to keep them from being stolen but our reactions to words are subjective - and those could lead to the best security of all.

In a new study, researchers from Binghamton University observed the brain signals of 45 volunteers as they read a list of 75 acronyms, such as FBI and DVD. They recorded the brain's reaction to each group of letters, focusing on the part of the brain associated with reading and recognizing words, and found that participants' brains reacted differently to each acronym, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer with 94 percent accuracy. The results suggest that brainwaves could be used by security systems to verify a person's identity. 

In  the United States, there are calls from the environmental fringes to put more labels on food - but not for a USDA federal standard label on GMOs, mandatory ones chosen by lobbyists in state governments. 

Labels are political, and everyone says they want more information on labels. But we know few people really read them on food, that is why so many people are fat. And few seem to read them on medicine or, if they do, they still think more will work better.

The UK’s onshore wind power industry may have been dealt a huge blow by new government policies announced last week, but this apparent setback should instead be seen as an opportunity. Elsewhere in Europe local, cooperative wind power is flourishing – could your town be next?

Do microbes grow differently on the International Space Station than they do on Earth? Results from the growth of microbes collected by citizen scientists as part of Project MERCCURI indicate that most behave similarly in both places - and that is a good news for space travel.