President Obama recently got some ridicule for hastily claiming he loved skeet shooting and therefore was not against sportsmen when he wanted to tell Americans they couldn't be trusted to decide how many bullets to buy for their guns.

That he was simultaneously offering bombs and fighter jets to terrorists in Egypt while he didn't trust his own citizens with small arms ammunition was not lost on his critics.

Want to feel small? Humans have been included in the most comprehensive tree of life to-date on placental mammals. And placental mammals are the largest branch of the mammalian family tree, with more than 5,100 living species. 

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona report they can cure diabetes in large animals with a single session of gene therapy. Writing in Diabetes, they said the dogs recovered their health and no longer show symptoms of the disease. In some cases, monitoring continued for over four years, with no recurrence of symptoms.

President Obama, who was going to heal the Earth in his first term, didn't do much of that but he put climate change back on the table in his second inaugural address and a new national poll says public support for regulating greenhouse gas emissions is with him - just not with the ways he tried in his first term.

When you think of the South Pole, you probably don't think of garbage.  

Yet according to a report commissioned by the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) in Germany, the Antarctic is littered with leftovers from derelict experimental set-ups and field huts are slowly decomposing. Garbage containing dangerous chemicals, discarded oil cans and car batteries is lying in the open. Coastal waters and beaches are suffering oil-pollution as a result of poor handling of fuel at those science stations. 

Using chromosomal data drawn from genetic databases, a group of researchers were able to identify the surname of one in every eight people from a sample of 911 American men. Sometimes other private information could be determined, including their geographic locations or the identities of their relatives.  

What happens when thousands of scientists do decades of research and taxpayers spend spend $15 billion on a scientifically validated site for nuclear waste storage but those science conclusions conflict with the anti-science beliefs of a president and his key ally in the Senate?

Before they go all-out supernova, some large stars undergo a sort of mini-explosion - cosmically speaking - which throws massive amounts of material into space. Though several models predict this behavior and evidence from supernovae point in that direction, observations of such pre-explosion outbursts are rare.

A new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters analyzed seismic waves that bombarded Earth's core and indicates that two or more continent-sized chunks of rock are colliding as they move at the bottom of Earth's thick mantle, atop the thicker core some 1,800 miles beneath the Pacific. That is creating a Florida-sized zone of partly molten rock that may be the root of either of two kinds of massive eruptions far in the future:

• Hotspot plume supervolcano eruptions like those during the past 2 million years at Wyoming's Yellowstone caldera, which covered North America with volcanic ash.