An oil palm system model based on the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM) framework and called APSIM Oil Palm is aimed at helping growers of the crop maximize the yields of their plantations, while minimizing detrimental environmental impacts.  

"Oil palm has become a major crop in the tropics, cultivated on more than 39 million acres of land," co-author Dr Paul Nelson of James Cook University said. "Demand for the product continues to grow, and the industry is expected to keep expanding in the foreseeable future. At the same time, there is significant concern about the industry's environmental impacts, with many purchasers wanting only certified sustainable palm oil.

Science is what scientist do. And the scientific method is the method scientists follow. A tautology you say? Not according to George Ellis and Joe Silk. In an opinion paper in Nature under the title 'Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics' Ellis and Silk argue that string theorists and cosmologists contributing to inflationary cosmology are rapidly turning physics into "a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any". The two authors play the 'testability card' and claim the high ground of scientific integrity, thereby dismissing a vast body of contemporary science as unscientific.

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431 (emphasis added)

 

-- What is that even supposed to mean, “Finding eternity in the now”?

Try to avoid making this face when dealing with a climate change skeptic this holiday. bark/flickr, CC BY

By Will J Grant, Australian National University and Rod Lamberts, Australian National University

Although prostate cancer will affect over 23,000 U.S. men next year, the individual genes that initiate prostate cancer formation are poorly understood, but finding an enzyme that regulates this process could provide excellent new prevention approaches for the malignancy.

Sirtuin enzymes have been implicated in neurodegeneration, obesity, heart disease, and cancer and a new paper in The American Journal of Pathology finds that the loss of SIRT1 drives the formation of early prostate cancer (prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia) in mouse models of the disease. 

Over the past decade, ocean acidification has started to receive recognition outside science, though primarily as another weapon in the 'carbon dioxide' culture war on the modern world, similar to methane being discussed this year.

Politics aside, it is a vital area for study and a new article outlines three major challenges to understanding the real issues and effects: It needs to expand from single to multiple drivers, from single species to communities and ecosystems, and from evaluating acclimation to understanding adaptation.  

If you think of quantum physics in terms of information about a system, it is a lot less complicated, according to a new paper. In that context, features of the quantum world previously considered distinct  -  wave-particle duality and the quantum uncertainty principle - are different manifestations of the same thing.

Cockroaches are most often though of as infecting human homes but a new species and a new subspecies discovered in China prefer to live a hermit life, drilling logs far away from crowds and houses. 

Butterflies aren't the only ones with snazzy stripes. Ben Sale, CC BY

By Callum Macgregor, University of Hull

Ask people to describe what they associate with butterflies, and you will probably get an image of a sunny summer’s day, with a beautiful peacock drifting gently on the cooling breeze.

Good Needlwork magazine shows you how to get better bosoms. Image: Dave Whatt

By Jo Brewis, University of Leicester

When my good friend and long-term collaborator Sam Warren was given a pile of women’s magazines from the 1930s by her grandmother Jane Frampton, we found among them 11 Christmas issues of Good Needlework, Model Housekeeping, The Needlewoman and Stitchcraft.