As the complex story of climate change unfolds, many of the forecasts are grim, but there are exceptions - the lowest-oxygen environments in the ocean would get now get worse, they may improve if climate change weakens the trade winds. Areas of extreme low-oxygen waters could shrink.

Warmer water contains less gas, so climate change is expected to reduce oxygen levels worldwide. Observations show this is already taking place in many places. Declines during the past 20 years in the tropical low-oxygen zones, the lowest-oxygen waters on the planet, had led to a 2008 study proposing that these zones would also get worse over time.

Oxazepam, a drug that is commonly used to treat insomnia and anxiety in humans, has been shown to reduce mortality rates in fish when it gets into natural water supplies. 

For their study, researchers retrieved two-year-old Eurasian perch from a lake in Sweden and randomly exposed them to high and low concentrations of Oxazepam, a benzodiazepine which is commonly used to treat anxiety and insomnia in humans and regularly contaminates surface waters via treated wastewater effluent. The researchers have previously found that the drug can increase the activity and boldness of Eurasian perch. 

Researchers have developed a powerful new tool to identify genetic changes in disease-causing bacteria that are responsible for antibiotic resistance. The team looked at the genome of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a bacterial species that causes 1.6 million deaths worldwide each year. In the most detailed research of its kind, scientists used a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to locate single-letter changes in the DNA code of the bacterium, which enable it to evade antibiotic treatment.

While GWAS has been used for a decade to identify gene function in humans, it was thought to be difficult to use the technique on bacterial DNA. 

A recent study conducted by Mayo Clinic researchers recommends laparoscopic cholecystectomies (surgical removal of the gallbladder) for pediatric patients suffering from gallstones and other gallbladder diseases. 

A cholecystectomy is a surgical procedure performed to remove the gallbladder, a pear-shaped organ located below the liver on the upper right side of the abdomen. The gallbladder is responsible for collecting and storing bile, which is a fluid secreted by the liver.

During a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, four incisions are made in the abdomen. Then, a small video camera and other special tools are used to remove the gallbladder.

Researchers have come step closer to understanding the birth of the sun.

A team led by Dr Maria Lugaro and Professor Alexander Heger, from Monash University, have investigated the solar system's prehistoric phase and the events that led to the birth of the sun. They used radioactivity to date the last time that heavy elements such as gold, silver, platinum, lead and rare-earth elements were added to the solar system matter by the stars that produced them.

For years, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have been working on origami robots — reconfigurable machines that can fold themselves into arbitrary shapes.

In Science, they report their latest milestone, which is a robot made almost entirely from parts produced by a laser cutter that folds itself up and crawls away as soon as batteries are attached to it. 

The robot is built from five layers of materials, all cut according to digital specifications by a laser cutter. The middle layer is copper, etched into an intricate network of electrical leads. It's sandwiched between two structural layers of paper; the outer layers are composed of a shape-memory polymer that folds when heated.

When it comes to elephants, the Wildlife Conservation Society does not believe in conservation. Or sustainability. Instead, existing ivory must be destroyed and legal ivory markets need to be closed. Otherwise, corruption, organized crime, and a lack of enforcement make legal trade in ivory the major contributing to the demise of Africa's elephants.

A new paper says that if we are to conserve wild populations of elephants across all regions of Africa, all domestic and international ivory markets need to be closed and any government stockpiles of ivory destroyed. According to the paper's author, corruption undermines all aspects of controls as long as a legal market remains.

Throughout the 1990s, biofuels were the environmental rage. Everyone from Vice-President Al Gore to Greenpeace touted them as the replacement for fossil fuels. The future belonged to such renewable energy.

Benefited by a Republican Congress that loved science, President George W. Bush mandated and subsidized biofuel energy, but only the final product. The product used to make this ethanol was left up to growers. 

In California, wildfires happen thousands of times per year, even in non-drought years. They happened long before climate change concerns but not factoring wildfires into simplistic parameter-based models of climate change meant we were not getting an accurate picture of the atmospheric reality.

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is not as easy to predict the path or track it experimentally as a straight-line between two points would be in our everyday, classical world.