Through the study of a popular Martian meteorite's age, University of Houston researchers have uncovered important details about the history of volcanic activity on Mars.

ALH84001 is a thoroughly studied, well-known Martian meteorite, unique among Mars rocks available for study on Earth. Since its formation age is more than 2.5 billion years older than any other recognized Martian meteorite, it offers scientists the only view of Mars' early history. Data from this rock may also help geologists better understand, through analogy, the processes of early Earth evolution.

The new analysis of ALH84001 is published in Science
                

Life and health insurance companies are greedy, for-profit enterprises that do not care about public health, according to Harvard researchers writing in the American Journal of Public Health.

Why such scorn for the insurance industry? The authors of the study found that U.S., Canadian and European-based insurance firms hold at least $1.88 billion of investments in fast-food companies.

Although there is normally nothing wrong with investing in fast food companies, the busy bodies at Harvard are irritated because the health care legislation just enacted in the U.S. essentially guarantees business for these insurance companies, and they are invested in the industry that is supposedly making us unhealthy.

Legislation introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) would require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide online access to research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

The legislation, H.R. 5037, would unlock unclassified research funded by the Department of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

New research conducted by Cardiff University scientists suggests that good parenting is still the best way to prevent teenage smoking.

The three-year-study of 3,500 11 to 15 year-olds found that children whose fathers regularly talk with them about 'things that matter' are less likely to take up smoking during early adolescence.
 
The findings were presented today at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference.

Only children who had never smoked at the time the study began took part. As well as their smoking, children were also asked about the frequency of parental communication, arguments with family members and the frequency of family meals - none which had a significant effect on smoking.

Carried by winds high up in the atmosphere, a massive cloud of ash from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier in southwest Iceland has led to the closure of airports throughout the UK and Scandinavia, with further disruption in northern Europe expected later today.

The ash, which can be seen as the large grey streak in the image, is drifting from west to east at a height of about 11 km above the surface Earth. It poses a serious danger to aircraft engines; hence the airspace shut down.

The volcano erupted, for the first time since 1821, on March 20 and erupted for a second time on Wednesday. The volcano, under the glacier ice, has caused ice melt and subsequent flooding and damage locally.

If church attendance is any indication, Americans are as religious as they were 30 years ago. But the makeup of the nation's congregations has undergone significant changes during that same stretch, according to a study published in Sociology of Religion.

The findings challenge the popular notion that church attendance has decreased. Aside from a moderate decline in the 1990s, the study shows that Americans' churchgoing routines have been fairly constant over the decades, at around 23 to 28 services a year.

"There is a small decline in church attendance over time, but not nearly as large as suggested in popular culture, or even by some social scientists," said University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist Philip Schwadel.

Chemical analysis of a stalagmite found in the mountainous Buckeye Creek basin of West Virginia suggests that native Americans contributed a significant level of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere through land use practices, such as burning trees to actively manage the forests and yield the nuts and fruit that were a large part of their diets.

The finding, published in The Holocene, provide more evidence that humans impacted global climate long before the modern industrial era.

A study published in Environmental Research Letters suggests a link between low solar activity and jet streams could explain why regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean might experience more frequent cold winters in years to come.

Scientists say the UK and Europe could experience temperatures not seen since the end of the seventeenth century as a result of the changes in solar activity.

"This year's winter in the UK has been the 14th coldest in the last 160 years and yet the global average temperature for the same period has been the 5th highest," said Lead author Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading. "We have discovered that this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low."

The 84 members of the Donner Party, trapped by a Sierra Nevada snowstorm on their way to California, did not resort to cannibalism, according to a new analysis of bones found at their Alder Creek campsite.

Instead of each other, anthropologists say the Donner Party probably ate cattle, deer, horse and dog and did their best to maintain a civilized lifestyle in an otherwise harsh setting.

Details of the analysis will appear in the July issue of American Antiquity.

The Donner Party has long been infamous for reportedly resorting to cannibalism after becoming trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California for months during the winter of 1846-1847.

Personalized genetics is hot in the news right now, but in fact we're generally terrible at using genotypes to predict who is going to get a disease. One villain here is the phenomenon known as epistasis, which essentially means that the physiological effect of one genetic variant depends on what other genetic variants (in other genes) are hanging around in the same genome.