A  research team has revealed conflicting climate change patterns between the middle latitude areas of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in relation to glacial and interglacial cycles which have been a puzzle for the past 60 years.

Their study collected samples from the stalagmites and flowstones in limestone caves which are called 'hard disks' containing the past climate change data and revealed how much they grew in which eras through isotope analysis and age dating, and traced the past climate changes by applying them to global climate change over 550,000 years.

Anesthesia works, we know that. Properly done, patients can be temporarily rendered completely unresponsive during surgery and then wake up again, with their memories and skills intact. Improperly done, of course, can be very bad.

But little is understood about the processes used by structurally normal brains to navigate from unconsciousness back to consciousness. Anesthesia leads the world in retracted papers.

Previous research has shown that the anesthetized brain is not "silent" under surgical levels of anesthesia but experiences certain patterns of activity, and it spontaneously changes its activity patterns over time.

If the world will have 9 billion people or more by 2050, we'll probably be okay.

The scare stories of food riots and mass famine once promoted by 1960s Doomsday Prophet Paul Ehrlich are today only promoted by, well, Paul Ehrlich. Even organic farmers say they can feed the world now.

In the last 30 years, America has led the world in science and nowhere has that been more evident than in food. American farmers have successfully dematerialized in a world of materialism - they grow more food on less land using fewer pesticides than ever thought possible. And the future looks even brighter.

In a marked cemetery northwest of Lake Baikal, a skeleton was found, buried ceremoniously with a nephrite disk and four arrowheads, one of which was broken and found in the eye socket. An arrow in the eye? That's no accident.

After radiocarbon dating and analysis, it was determined the individual was a 35-40 year-old male from the early Bronze Age, between 2406 and 1981 B.C.

Unlike most hunter-gatherer societies of the Bronze Age, the people of the Baikal region of modern Siberia (Russia) respected their dead with formal graves. This particular specimen was so unique that bioarchaeologist Angela Lieverse traveled across the world just to bring it back to the Canadian Light Source synchrotron for examination.

New observations made using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show that dwarf galaxies are responsible for forming a large proportion of the universe's stars.

The result supports a decade-long investigation into whether there is a link between a galaxy's mass and its star-forming activity, and helps paint a consistent picture of how galaxies grew and evolved 3.5 to 6 billion years after the beginning of the universe. 

Cancer care has had lots of known side effects but one goes less discussed - the "financial toxicity", which is the expense, anxiety and loss of confidence confronting those who face large, unpredictable costs, often compounded by decreased ability to work.

Writing in Cancer, a team of University of Chicago cancer specialists describe the first tool to measure a patient's risk for, and ability to tolerate, financial stress. The researchers named their patient-reported outcome measure COST (COmprehensive Score for financial Toxicity) and uses
11 questions, assembled and refined from conversations with more than 150 patients with advanced cancer. 

A research group uncovered that the development of wings in fruit flies does not progress synchronously with the organism's development. Instead, it is coordinated with the whole body only at distinct 'milestones'. This study helps explain how an organism facing environmental and physiological perturbations retains the ability to build correct functional organs and tissues in a proportional adult body.

Significant progress has been made over the last 25 years to identify genetic abnormalities associated with congenital myasthenic syndromes (CMS) but many patients remain genetically undiagnosed. A new report identifies a gene defect in mitochondria, specifically the citrate carrier SLC25A1, that may underlie deficits in neuromuscular transmission seen in two siblings.

"While mitochondrial gene defects can cause a myriad of neurological disorders including myopathies and neuropathies, these have not been specifically implicated in defects of the neuromuscular junction," says Hanns Lochmüller, MD, Professor of Experimental Myology, Institute of Genetic Medicine, MRC Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

Many pathogenic bacteria use special secretion systems to deliver toxic proteins into host cells and now researchers have determined the structure of a crucial part of one of these systems – which are possible targets for novel antibiotics. 

Steve Jobs was a good CEO, a visionary. He was also known as a monster driven to fits of rage and a known SEC law violator who gave himself stock options without bothering to tell anyone. He gave nothing to charity. He was in both a personal and a business sense, greedy.

But he was good for shareholders. 

When is a greedy CEO bad for business instead of good? An article in the Journal of Management examines the effects of greed on shareholder wealth and looks at whether various contextual factors, like a strong board of directors, CEO tenure and discretion make the situation better or worse. The results were that a powerful board or long CEO tenure can moderate the relationship between greed and shareholder return.