The Tambora volcanic eruption in 1815 is famous for its impact on climate worldwide. As a result, the year 1816 was given memorable names such as 'Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death', the 'Year of the Beggar' and the 'Year Without a Summer' because of cold weather and unseasonable frosts, crop failure and famine across Europe and North America. 

Some even claim the conditions inspired literary works such as Byron's 'Darkness' and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Anyone who tells you they have a super food or a potion to impact a complex trait is sellinf you something. Life is rarely simple. The things we care about most, from crop yields to disease risks, are instead "complex traits."

Human height is a textbook example of a complex trait while attributes like risk for a particular human disease are shaped by multiple genetic and environmental influences.

The value of the Science 2.0 approach, and the wealth of Big Data that geneticists now have available, is in finding the genes involved and then quantifying their importance when other circumstances are factored in.  

For obvious reasons spaceflight has been reserved for governments and the very wealthy. And when it comes to governments, the criteria are stringent. They will get thousands of applications per year and quickly weed out most of them. Predominantly you have to already be a government employee to have any chance of being an astronaut so that is a big disqualification for much of the best and brightest in America.

In American culture, media and men are criticized for how women feel about their bodies while in Europe women are given more credit for being able to decide for themselves how they feel. 

Europeans may be onto something. A paper in Psychology of Women Quarterly finds that body dissatisfaction among young girls isn't caused by ads for skinny jeans on television or males, it is caused by older girls in schools. 

Most dogs are happy and they are "man's best friend" because they brighten our day. If you rescue a starving dog they will love you forever whereas if you rescue a starving human, in a week they will have decided they did you a favor. With cats, that sentiment lasts until the first meal is over.

But inside, your dog may be more pessimistic, according to a paper from Dr. Melissa Starling of the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney. 

Dogs were taught to associate two different sounds (two octaves apart) with whether they would get the preferred reward of milk or instead get the same amount of water. Once the dogs have learnt the discrimination task, they are presented with 'ambiguous' tones.

While abortion is a common feature of the developed world, there remains some controversy about when it should be allowed. Only the United States and Canada still allow late-term abortion on demand because in the modern world a baby in the third trimester is already clear alive and will remain so with some care. In the third trimester the survival rate in America is 96%, only slightly below full-term children.

Can sound vibrations replace pesticides? Researchers are adapting different eco-friendly methods to try and boost harvests and open up a new chapter in sustainable farming.

Scientists in Northern Italy are experimenting with what they call eco-friendly sound and odor devices to fight off insects from their cultivated fields., though environmental activists don't accept the science of pesticides that have passed registration for 40 years and genetic modification almost as long so believing they will consider sound vibrations friendly is a stretch.

A tone generator is a useful piece of test equipment used, for example, to test the frequency range of audio equipment such as your stereo or the external speakers for your iPod. A tone generator can also be used to tune a musical instrument such as a guitar. You can make a simple tone generator using a 555 Timer IC, a capacitor, potentiometer, speaker, and a power source (circuit pictured above). Here’s the schematic:

By Charles Q. Choi, Inside Science

It's a myth that all sharks will drown if they stop moving. However, scientists discovered that as the oceans grow more acidic this century, sharks may swim for longer times than before. These new findings suggest that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels causing this ocean acidification could significantly disrupt the lives of these predators, which are already in sharp decline globally.