Each year, the biosphere balances its atmospheric budget: The carbon dioxide absorbed by plants in the spring and summer as they convert solar energy into food is released back to the atmosphere in autumn and winter. Levels of the greenhouse gas fall and rise with growth and harvesting.

By Amanda Bates, University of Southampton

We live in a time when our climate is warming more rapidly than ever before. Rising temperature and associated changes in weather are driving shifts in the distributions of species on Earth.

Some are thriving in these new climate conditions and have even moved into new regions that were historically inhospitable.

One concern for us humans is how harmful species – diseases or pests – are responding to a changing climate.

Iowa corn farmers have a lot of clout during the political cycle in America. Former US Vice-President Al Gore even sided with environmentalists and embraced ethanol - which all of science said was a bad idea - and later acknowledged it was just to appeal to Iowa. They help pick presidents and now it turns out that their 2.2 billion bushels of corn are helping to save the planet too.

By Sue Thomas, Bournemouth University

Looking over the landscape I could see an old tree standing frozen and seemingly dead, its branches coated with icy rime. Around it, mossy grass and small rocks lay beneath a coating of snow and in the distance glistening waterfalls tumbled down the sides of whitened mountains.

It looked like the wilds of Ireland in wintertime, but the view existed only in my phone. My task, using a handheld biosensor called PIP, was to bring summer to this deeply cold outdoor scene by the powers of mental relaxation.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Tropical Storm Adjali on Nov. 19th at 9:05 UTC (1:05 A.M. Pacific) curving to the southwest on its trek through the Southern Indian Ocean.

The MODIS image showed that the storm began curving to the southwest, and despite slight weakening, thunderstorms circled around the low-level center.

In bean sprouts, a collection of amino acids called a protein complex allows them to grow longer in the darkness than in the light. In humans, there is a similar protein complex called CSN, and its subunit CSN6 is now believed to be a cancer-causing gene that impacts activity of another gene (Myc) tied to tumor growth.

The Lacey Act, introduced in 1900 by Republican Congressman John F. Lacey of Iowa, was originally designed to stop illegal game across state borders but was then expanded, notably by President Ronald Reagan, to include illegal logging and breaking the laws of foreign governments.

The LHCb experiment collaborators at the Large Hadron Collider have announced discovery of two new particles in the baryon family.

The particles, known as the Xi_b'^- and Xi_b*^-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*⁰, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. 

Bacteria are everywhere and so efforts to make cleaner energy using them are ongoing.

A report today shows how electrons hop across otherwise electrically insulated areas of bacterial proteins, and that the rate of electrical transfer is dependent on the orientation and proximity of these electrically conductive 'stepping stones'. It is hoped that this natural process can be used to create viable 'bio batteries' which could produce energy for portable technology such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops - powered by human or animal waste. So using your tablet on the toilet would then make even more sense.

By Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia

It’s official: men are better writers than women.

The news came as something of a shock to a hardened feminist such as myself, but a quick survey of prescribed and suggested texts set for senior English in most Australian states demonstrates this is a fact routinely taught to teenagers in school.