The scientific community may agree that anthropogenic global warming poses a real threat, but the general public isn't all that worried about the changing climate. Public concern about global warming has dropped sharply since the fall of 2008, according to the results of a national survey released today by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities.

The survey found that Only 50 percent of Americans now say they are "somewhat" or "very worried" about global warming, a 13-point decrease. The percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening has declined 14 points, to 57 percent. The percentage of Americans who think global warming is caused mostly by human activities dropped 10 points, to 47 percent.

According to a new study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, parents who try to teach responsible drinking to their children by letting them drink at home may be setting their teens up for all kinds of alcohol related problems later in life.

The study included 428 families with two children between the ages of 13 and 15. Parents and teens completed questionnaires on drinking habits at the outset and again one and two years later.

Based on new radiocarbon dating evidence for the Late Aurignacian of Portugal, an archaeological culture unquestionably associated with modern humans,  an international team of researchers claims that the last Neanderthals in Europe died out approximately 37,000 years ago.

The new paper, published in PLoS ONE builds on earlier research which proposed that, south of the Cantabro-Pyrenean mountain chain, Neanderthals survived for several millennia after being replaced or assimilated by anatomically modern humans everywhere else in Europe.

A new study in Biological Chemistry suggests that Vitamin D, readily available in supplements or cod liver oil, may counter the effects of Crohn's disease.

Researchers from McGill University and the Université de Montréal found that Vitamin D acts directly on the beta defensin 2 gene, which encodes an antimicrobial peptide, and the NOD2 gene that alerts cells to the presence of invading microbes. Both Beta-defensin and NOD2 have been linked to Crohn's disease. If NOD2 is deficient or defective, it cannot combat invaders in the intestinal tract.

Along with drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, a team of climate scientists says internationally coordinated research and field-testing on geoengineering the planet's atmosphere need to begin immediately in order to limit risk of climate change. In a new Nature editorial, the team argues that collaborative and government-supported studies on solar-radiation management, a form of geoengineering, would reduce the risk of nations' unilateral experiments and help identify technologies with the least risk.

Whether prayer is supernatural or not, the common religious practice may generally benefit the Nine out of 10 Americans who say they pray. In a recent study appearing in Psychological Science, researchers found that when people's prayers are directed at those who have wronged them they're more likely to forgive and move on.

The conclusion is based on two experiments. In the first, researchers had a group of men and women pray one single prayer for their romantic partner's well being. Others—the experimental controls—simply described their partner, speaking into a tape recorder.

Photosynthesizing sea slugs take 'you are what you eat' to an extreme: by eating photosynthesizing algae, these "solar-powered" sea slugs are able to live off photosynthesis for months. How does this work? Is this just a straightforward case of symbiosis between algae and sea slugs?

It turns out that this is not a case of symbiosis: this is a case of the amazing and ubiquitous power of viruses to dramatically reshape the genetic landscape.

Cheap, powerful sequencing has enabled scientists to sample the viral world like never before. Our understanding of marine viruses, in particular, has exploded as researchers have sequenced whatever they can find in samples of seawater.

I recently encountered the following chart as part of an argument that CO₂ does not affect global temperatures. It instantly raised my suspicions because the temperature data is just too clean--I can't believe that global temperatures is almost always one of two values, 12 degrees or 22 degrees, and that there is no noise in the measurements.



Note that this chart implies that the current temperature is about 12 degrees Celsius.