Tropical climates that allow for year-round farming have a tremendous economic advantage, even in the developing world but corn and soybean farmers in Mato Grosso, Brazil have a developed world problem;a 10 percent post-harvest loss, partially due to a lack of storage. 

A research project used Geographic Information System (GIS) software to map the coordinates of commercial, cooperative and private grain storage facilities in Mato Grosso. They focused on capacity greater than 50,000 metric tons, mapping the state's 2,143 registered warehouses. 

Our prehistoric close cousins, the Neandertals, were more similar than science used to think in a variety of ways.

And according to a new paper, they had something resembling modern speech and language, which can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.

Neanderthals have fascinated the academic world and the general public ever since their discovery almost 200 years ago. Initially thought to be sub-human brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were later found to be a successful form of humanity inhabiting vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, during harsh ages and milder interglacial periods. 

As Egypt fights over new leadership, Israeli archaeologists have found evidence of an ancient ruler in northern Israel. 

At a site in Tel Hazor National Park, north of the Sea of Galilee, archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have unearthed part of a unique Sphinx belonging to one of the ancient pyramid-building pharaohs. The Sphinx was brought over from Egypt, with a hieroglyphic inscription between its front legs that bears the name of the Egyptian king Mycerinus, who ruled in the third millennium BCE, more than 4,000 years ago and was one of the builders of the famous Giza pyramids. 

Wildfires and their witch's brew of carbon-containing particles significantly degrade air quality, damage human and wildlife health, and interact with sunlight to affect climate.

Measurements taken during the 2011 Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos National Laboratory show that the actual carbon-containing particles emitted by fires are very different than those used in numerical models, providing the potential for inaccuracy in current climate-modeling results.

Thanks to a Facebook friend, I got to give a look today at a very interesting pair of graphs. The first one shows the number of researchers per million inhabitants divided by country, in a world map. The second shows the fraction of female researchers. The data comes from UNESCO, and is based on surveys dated 2011.

By now everyone is familiar with some of the more controversial topics in policy discussions featuring scientific topics, so that GMO foods or climate change are readily recognized as "hot button" items.  Without getting into those discussions, one of the arguments that is often made against a particular position is that the data is wrong, or that scientists are doing something wrong.  In effect, the implication is that science has been known to be wrong in the past and therefore we can expect that it could be wrong in its assertions now.

When the members of a choir sing their heart beats are synchronized, according to a study from the Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg.

The pulse of performing choir members tend to increase and decrease in unison. 

In the research project "Kroppens Partitur" (The Body's Musical Score), researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy are studying how music, in purely biological terms, affects our body and our health. The object is to find new forms where music may be used for medical purposes, primarily within rehabilitation and preventive care and the research group says they were able to show how the musical structure influences the heart rate of choir members.

Max Scherzer, a 6-foot, 3-inch tall pitcher leads Major League Baseball in wins. He hasn't lost a game for the Detroit Tigers this season.

He is example of Constructal-law Theory, said Duke University engineer Adrian Bejan. Constructal-law Theory predicts that elite pitchers will continue to be taller and thus throw faster and seems also to apply to athletes who compete in golf, hockey and boxing.

Studying athletes  gives insight into the biological evolution of human design in nature because sports are meticulous about keeping statistics. The biological evolution of human design in nature is what Bejan terms the Constructal-law Theory, which is really a hypothesis but using Theory as a proper name is all the rage.

How did numerous small, glassy spherules become embedded within specimens of the largest class of meteorites, the chondrites? British mineralogist Henry Sorby first described these spherules, called chondrules, in 1877. Sorby suggested that they might be "droplets of fiery rain" which somehow condensed out of the cloud of gas and dust that formed the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. 

Researchers have continued to regard chondrules as liquid droplets that had been floating in space before becoming quickly cooled, but how did the liquid form? "There's a lot of data that have been puzzling to people," said Lawrence Grossman, professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.

Hydrogen sulfide, the pungent-smelling gas produced by rotten eggs, is a key player in colon cancer metabolism, and a potential target for therapies for the disease, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cell-culture and mouse experiments demonstrated that colon cancer cells produce large amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and depend on the compound for survival and growth. 

"They love it and they need it," said University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston professor Csaba Szabo, co-author of the paper. "Colon cancer cells thrive on this stuff — our data show that they use it to make energy, to divide, to grow and to invade the host."