Mesopelagic fishes like lantern fishes (Myctophidae) and cyclothonids (Gonostomatidae) live in the twilight zone of the ocean, between 200 and 1,000 meters deep.

 With a stock estimated at 1,000 million tons so far, mesopelagic fish dominate the total biomass of fish in the ocean and are the most numerous vertebrates of the biosphere. Now it turns out they have been severely underestimated. Researchers writing in Nature Communications have estimated their numbers are 10 times higher than previous estimated, based on acoustic observations conducted during the circumnavigation of the Malaspina Expedition.

Policy makers know to hit biology where it counts; in the wallet. Rural farmers in Mexico have seen honey shipments to Germany rejected because of genetically modified organism (GMO) soybean pollen in honey samples

Is it harmful? No, but that is not how European science policy is written. Instead, because GMO soybean pollen in honey has not been approved for human consumption in honey, it as returned as unsafe and farmers have to take the hit - unless they stop using GMOs and use more pesticides and herbicides.

The world's oceans contain algae that produce certain chemicals
that can accumulate in seafood and are known to cause brain damage.

This natural neurotoxin, domoic acid, is a very stable and heat resistant and is also toxic to the kidneys, but at much lower concentrations than guidance has suggested, according to an upcoming study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN).

It's cold and snowy just about everywhere except where you expect it. Ice in northern Alaska’s lakes during winter months is on the decline, as shown by twenty years of satellite radar imagery demonstrating how changes in our climate are affecting high-latitude environments - at least in the last few decades. 

Changes in air temperature and winter precipitation over the last five decades have affected the timing, duration and thickness of the ice cover on lakes in the Arctic. In this region, warmer climate conditions result in thinner ice cover on shallow lakes and, consequently, a smaller fraction of lakes freezing all the way through during winter months. 

We have a biological clock related to sleep cycles and a new paper says we have weight loss cycles related to behavior; people are going to gain weight on the weekend so if they lose more during the week, that weight loss cycle will result in better health.

Dr. Brian Wansink of the marketing department at Cornell University, in collaboration with researchers from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Tampere University of Technology, looked into the impact that the seven-days-a-week human cycle has on weight.

For the past eight years, the Amazon rain forest has gotten greener as the weather seemingly got hotter and drier each year from June to October. 

Limited rainfall didn't prevent thriving vegetation, which really put a damper on the simplistic 'turn one climate knob and all of our issues are solved' narrative. 

Evolutionary biology sounds exciting - there wouldn't be any movies on the SyFy Channel without Gatoroids and Sharknados and other feats of life science run amok - but in reality you are going to spend a lot of time paying your dues watching sponges in mid-sneeze before you get to create an epidemic or a giant monster.

Sneezing sponges? Isn't that a little far-fetched, even for the network that brought us "Arachnoquake"? No, actually the sponge thing is real, and a new paper points to Porifera sneezing as evidence for a sensory organ in one of the most basic multicellular organisms on Earth, even though it doesn't even have a nervous system to interpret sensory information.

Why do men and women have different heights? Why do people have different predispositions to BMI, blood pressure and lipid levels?

Chromosome X is one of the two sex-determining chromosomes and researchers from the University of Helsinki set out to analyze the commonly occurring genetic variation in chromosome X  to find genetic factors that could explain individual differences in various traits.

Hundreds of genetic variants having an effect on these traits have already been identified but the X chromosome has not been studied in most of  previous studies. 25,000 Northern European individuals later, the researchers say they have some answers. 

How are accurate are the world's most advanced weather forecasting models?

They perform okay, at least when it comes to predicting the very near future.  Two University of Iowa researchers, David Lavers and Gabriele Villarini, evaluated rainfall forecasts from eight different global numerical weather prediction (NWP) models and their ability to predict the Sept. 9th-16th, 2013 extreme rainfall that caused severe flooding in Boulder, Colorado.

During September of 2013, Boulder County and surrounding areas experienced severe flooding and heavy rain resulting in fatalities, the loss of homes and businesses, and the declaration of a major disaster.

United States dominance in science and technology declined  during the last decade as several Asian nations rapidly increased their innovation capacities.

According to a new report, The 2014 volume of Science and Engineering Indicators prepared by NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), the major Asian economies, taken together, now perform a larger share of global R&D than the U.S., and China performs nearly as much of the world's high-tech manufacturing as the U.S.