Historical acid deposits have greatly reduced calcium levels in Canadian lakes and that is dramatically impacting populations of calcium-rich plankton such as Daphnia - water fleas that dominate these ecosystems. 

It is commonly believed that one key issue in brain again is that it becomes less flexible - plastic - and that learning may therefore become more difficult.

A new study contradicts that and shows that plasticity did occur in seniors who learned a task well, it just occurred in a different part of the brain than in younger people.

When many older subjects learned a new visual task, the researchers found, they unexpectedly showed a significantly associated change in the white matter of the brain. White matter is the the brain's "wiring," or axons, sheathed in a material called myelin that can make transmission of signals more efficient. Younger learners, meanwhile, showed plasticity in the cortex, where neuroscientists expected to see it.

Scientists have found that seed dormancy, a property that prevents germination when conditions are not right, was present in the first seeds 360 million years ago.

Seed dormancy is a phenomenon that has intrigued naturalists for decades, since it conditions the dynamics of natural vegetation and agricultural cycles. There are several types of dormancy, and some of them are modulated by environmental conditions in more subtle ways than others.

In an article published in the New Phytologist journal, the scientists studied the evolution of dormancy in seeds using more than 14.000 species. 

Time is relative. What is a long time to humans is nothing to a mountain. Like humans, mountains usually burst on the scene, then they stand tall and finally age wears them down and their sharp features soften and they become grow shorter and rounder.

Not all mountains, though. The Gamburtsev Mountains in the middle of Antarctica look quite young for their age. Though the Gamburtsevs were discovered in the 1950s, they remained unexplored until government budget increases and few things left above ground to explore led scientists to fly ice-penetrating instruments over the mountains 60 years later.

Following a woman in high heels up out of the subway is like discovering America. Following a woman in flip-flops up out of the subway is like riding the subway. - Rich Brookhiser

Women judge men by their shoes, that is no secret. Women colloquially say that they know how a man will treat them based on how much he cares about his footwear and (bonus tell: how he treats the waitress in a restaurant).

On a quest to design an alternative to the complex approaches currently used to produce electrons within microwave electron guns, a team of researchers have demonstrated a plug-and-play solution capable of operating in a high-electric-field environment with a high-quality electron beam.

Unfamiliar with microwave electron guns? They provide a higher current and much higher quality electron beams than conventional DC guns for X-ray sources . Beams of this sort are also used in free-electron lasers, synchrotrons, linear colliders and wakefield accelerator schemes. But the electron emission mechanisms involved -- laser irradiation of materials (photocathodes) and heating of materials (thermionic cathodes) -- tend to be complex, bulky or extremely expensive.

Dr. Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) and Andrew (Miles Teller) in Whiplash

By Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne

A decade of piano lessons with a woman who never allowed my lack of passion, prowess or practice ruin a good thing, exists as a mere red herring.

A good woman, a sane woman, but even ten years with her wasn’t enough to ameliorate the (mis)education I got from music classes in primary school.

Where it begins. Nature

By Andy Tattersall, University of Sheffield

Dirty Harry once said, “Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one”. Now that the Internet has made it easier than ever to share an unsolicited opinion, traditional methods of academic review are beginning to show their age.

We can now leave a public comment on just about anything – including the news, politics, YouTube videos, this article and even the meal we just ate. These comments can sometimes help consumers make more informed choices. In return, companies gain feedback on their products.

There are cosmic alignments over the largest structures ever discovered in the Universe - the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in quasars billions of light years apart are parallel to each other. 

Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centers. These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together.

A new America? Warner Bros. Pictures

By Peter Bloom, The Open University

"Interstellar" has been praised for its attempt to make the “hard science” of astrophysics both accessible and exciting to a popular audience.

Through cutting-edge special effects, it takes audiences on a journey through space and time. It does so by drawing on groundbreaking scientific theories involving relativity, wormholes, black holes and the power of gravity.