Carbon dioxide, in its ionic form bicarbonate, has a regulating function in the splitting of water in photosynthesis. This means that carbon dioxide has an additional role to being reduced to sugar, according to scientists at Umeå University in Sweden.

Tobacco is a high-density crop that is mowed several times throughout its cycle and that can be a good thing, because it can produce as much as 160 tons of fresh biomass per hectare.

Biomass that is suitable for producing bioethanol.  Smoking cigarettes is bad but renewable energy is good, tobacco just needs some help from science.

Singlet oxygen is an electronically excited state of oxygen that is less stable than normal oxygen. Its high reactivity has enabled its use in photodynamic therapy, in which light is used in combination with a photosensitizing drug to generate large amounts of singlet oxygen to kill cancer cells or various pathogens. 

Global warming may be a topic of debate and arguments about measurements and models, but some things are measurable right now, like environmental pollutants. 

Although persistent environmental pollutants are released worldwide, the Arctic and Antarctic regions are significantly more contaminated with persistent organic pollutants than elsewhere; marine animals living there have some of the highest levels of persistent organic pollutant (POP) contamination of any creatures and the Inuit people of the Arctic, who rely on a diet of fish, seals and whales, have also been shown to have higher POP concentrations than people living in our latitudes.

A new paper suggests that genes evolve more rapidly in species containing germ plasm, which
challenges a long held belief about the way certain species of vertebrates evolved. 

The results came about as the researchers put to the test a novel theory that early developmental events dramatically alter the vertebrate body plan and the way evolution proceeds. 

Dog owners in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia might want to consider penning up their dogs more often: hybridization of wolves with shepherd dogs might be more common, and more recent, than previously thought, according to a recently published study in the Journal of Heredity (DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esu014).

Glacial cycles at 104-yr time scale have been the focus of Quaternary paleoclimatology over the last century. In recent years with the emergence of continuous high-resolution records (ice cores, deep-sea sediments etc.) from the longer geological past, increasing evidence underscores the significance of long- duration processes at the time scale of 105-yr or more. WANG Pinxian and colleagues from the State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, reviewed long-term variations in the oceanic carbon reservoir and indicated their crucial role in major climate regime changes over Quaternary glacial cycles.

It’s been all over the news. 

Depending on the accuracy of the headline, you may conclude that worms live longer when exposed to glucosamine, mice live 10 percent longer when fed glucosamine or that YOU will live 8 years longer if you take the stuff.

As usual, the devil is in the headlines.

Some were pretty accurate: Glucosamine promotes longevity in worms and mice, study says (from the L.A. Times). 

Below is a clip from a chapter of my book where I describe the story of the silicon microvertex detector of the CDF experiment. CDF collected proton-antiproton collisions from the Tevatron collider in 1985, 1987-88, 1992-96, and 2001-2011. Run 1A occurred in 1992, and it featured for the first time in a hadron collider a silicon strip detector, the SVX. The SVX would prove crucial for the discovery of the top quark.

Google Earth Mystery Object? - Hardly!

What is it that you can see in this snapshot of Google Earth in the vicinity of Amsterdam Island?


If you think it's a special antenna for transmitting earthquake waves in the general direction of people that a Secret Government Agency^TM hates, or if you just know that it's a secret underwater base you are probably a conspiracy theorist.

If you think it's Atlantis you are probably some kind of new age hippie.

If you think it's an image artifact you are probably very good at image analysis.  But wrong.