University of California - Davis biochemists have shown for the first time that the ergodic theorem can be demonstrated by a collection of individual protein molecules; specifically, a protein that unwinds DNA.

If you have ever used a GPS system to find a route to somewhere, you might have wondered on occasion how they can be so wrong - though it's often not the signal itself that is wrong.

Yet sometimes a distorted signal can be a good thing. By figuring out how messed up GPS satellite signals get when bouncing around in a storm, researchers have found a way to do something completely outside their original intent: measure and map the wind speeds of hurricanes.

Tick-borne illnesses are on the rise, or at least better reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lyme disease leads the pack, with some 35,000 cases reported annually but in the Northeast, the black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) also infect people with other maladies, among them anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and now Powassan encephalitis, according to a new paper in Parasites and Vectors.

Powassan encephalitis is caused by Powassan virus and its variant, deer tick virus. The virus is spread to people by infected ticks, and can cause central nervous system disruption, encephalitis, and meningitis. There is a 10-15% fatality rate in reported cases, with many survivors suffering long-term neurological damage.

Satellite observations of the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic haven't been around long enough, and prior methods were too inaccurate, to be able to say whether the loss of ice today will persist in the future.

Predictions of the contribution of both ice shields to the sea level by the year 2100 may be off by more than 35 centimeters - but whether they will be too high or too low is unclear. Too high is obviously no problem. Too low could be a real worry.

A 'rather bizarre' result using a robotic frog and recorded mating call may provide insight into how complex traits evolve by hooking together much simpler traits.

Researchers have discovered that two wrong mating calls can make a right for female túngara frogs. It's not a defect in the frog brain, but an example of how well frogs have evolved to extract meaning from noise, much the way humans have. 

The best way to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change is through the use of a European-style cap-and-trade scheme, according to a paper by business school scholars.  

Certain sections of strike-slip faults, known as restraining bends, are sites of unusual tectonic activity because they undergo more contractional motion than surrounding areas.

These bends can be the site of major contraction-dominated earthquakes that are difficult to characterize using traditional means. Over millions of years, these earthquakes build substantial mountain ranges, such as the site of the present study, the Santa Cruz Mountains, California.

Baseball players who have undergone ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) surgery have able to return to the same or higher level of competition for an extended period of time, according to results presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Chicago. 

Lake Qinghai is the largest interior plateau lake in North China and has long been sensitive to climate change and the environmental effects of Tibetan Plateau uplift. 

Long, continuous, terrestrial lacustrine sedimentary records are extremely rare but an almost continuous 626 m long sediment core of ancient Lake Qinghai have been obtained from an in-filled part of the southern lake basin, which documents both the age of the origin of the lake and the evolution of the East Asian monsoon during the Late Cenozoic.

The end-Permian mass extinction is the most severe biodiversity crisis in the history of life. 

Immediately after the extinction, many marine taxa suffered a dramatic size reduction (i.e., the 'Lilliput Effect') and compiled data show that recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction was not a smooth process but included several episodes of environmental disturbance and three further episodes of extinction.

The third episode of extinction occurs near the Smithian/Spathian boundary (SSB), around 1.8 million years after the end-Permian extinction and was recently associated to an episode of extreme warmth - true global warming.