Researchers at the universities of Leicester and Oxford have made a discovery about plant growth which could potentially have an enormous impact on crop production as global warming increases.

Dr Kerry Franklin, from the University of Leicester Department of Biology led the study which has identified a single gene responsible for controlling plant growth responses to elevated temperature.

As more research is conducted on the development and spread of pandemic type II diabetes, there is more evidence than ever that diabetes is intricately linked to obesity, which is spreading in the US at an alarming rate.

To combat the struggle of managing type II diabetes, physicians have turned to unconventional methods to reduce fat and likewise combat diabetes symptoms.  Obesity reduction was the theme of the 2009 UK Diabetes Professional Conference in Glasgow, and efforts to treat and reverse diabetes through bariatric surgery was one of the most controversial topics.

Dr. James E. Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is quoted and referred to in the New York Times article "The Civil Heretic - Freeman Dyson - Profile"  - by Nicholas Dawidoff, March 29, 2009, New York Times, page MM32 and in the New York Times Magazine, March 25, 2009.

Dr. Hansen sent his response to the article to those who have subscribed to his e-mail commentaries the day before its publication in the Sunday New York Times. He has given me permission to convey his clarification in its entirety:

New York Times Magazine
 

 As I briefly laid out in The Science Of Baseball: Coefficients And Happy Haitians, people like home runs though baseball purists don't necessarily think much of them - unless their team gets one.
 

Video games that involve high levels of action,like first-person-shooter games, can increase real-world vision, according to research in Nature Neuroscience, including discerning slight differences in shades of gray; an attribute of the human visual system that can't be improved, it has been believed.

Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, says that very practiced action gamers can actually become 58 percent better at perceiving fine differences in contrast.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to stare at people's mouths rather than their eyes. A new study of 2-year-olds with the social deficit disorder suggests why they might find mouths so attractive: lip-sync—the exact match of lip motion and speech sound. Such audiovisual synchrony preoccupied toddlers who have autism, while their unaffected peers focused on socially meaningful movements of the human body, such as gestures and facial expressions. 

Chemists at the University of Illinois have created a simple and inexpensive molecular technique that replaces an expensive atomic force microscope for studying what happens to small molecules when they are stretched or compressed. 

The researchers use stiff stilbene, a small, inert structure, as a molecular force probe to generate well-defined forces on various molecules, atom by atom. 

"By pulling on different pairs of atoms, we can explore what happens when we stretch a molecule in different ways," said chemistry professor Roman Boulatov. "That information tells us a lot about the properties of fleeting structures called transition states that govern how, and how fast, chemical transformations occur." 

The benefits to animals of omega 3 fatty acids in fish oils have been well documented – helping the heart and circulatory system.   Can they also help in improving meat quality and reducing methane emissions?

Perhaps.   Methane given off by farm animals is a major contributor to greenhouse gas levels and researchers from University College Dublin have reported that by including 2% fish oil in the diet of cattle they achieved a reduction in the amount of methane released by the animals.

Important business has taken me out of sunny California and across the country to the slightly warmer March days of Florida; baseball spring training.

I maintain an affection for spring training even though I no longer live in a winter climate where a few days of sunshine after 5 months of cold can truly be appreciated.    But I spent my childhood in Florida, in a baseball haven aptly called Dodgertown, so cold climate or not baseball in spring is a necessary ritual.   It gives me a reminder I haven't seen my family in a year and spring baseball is somehow both better and worse than regular season baseball, when it becomes more of a business and obviously played by the best of the best.

A while back there was a news story that the Pantheon may have been constructed to create a special effect in the sunlight at the equinoxes. I'm slow in reacting because I've read the book where the claim appears, and I've been taking time to try and track down one or two other ideas regarding the Pantheon. The story is based on a chapter from a new book Time in Antiquity by Robert Hannah, and it's a great example of how thinking about ancient astronomy has gently expanded over the past decade.