The ocean sucks up heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) building up in our atmosphere with help from tiny plankton.

Like plants on land, plankton convert CO2 into organic carbon via photosynthesis and then can sink into the deep ocean, carrying carbon with them. They decompose when bacteria convert their remains back into CO2.

This "biological pump," if it operated 100 percent efficiently, would mean nearly every atom of carbon drawn into the ocean would be converted to organic carbon, sink into the deep ocean, and remain sequestered from the atmosphere for millennia. But like hail stones that melt before reaching the ground, some carbon never makes it to the deep ocean, allowing CO2 to leak back into the upper ocean and ultimately exchange with the atmosphere.

3,000 children were treated in U.S. emergency departments in 2012 for eye injuries related to paintball guns, airsoft guns, BB guns and pellet guns - but the big increase was in airsoft guns. Paintball injuries have remained minor (0.4 per million children) and for over a decade BB gun manufacturers have restricted sales and marketing to minors, so there are not many "You'll shoot your eye out" moments due to those.

Investigators from the Stanford University School of Medicine found that the rates for eye injuries from non-bullet guns increased by 511% between 2010 and 2012, reaching 8.4 per million children and the rise was almost exclusively due to air gun related injuries, which parallels their growth in popularity.

Autonomous locomotion for a macroscopic liquid metal machine has been made self-actuated when fueled with aluminum (Al) flake and now a much larger liquid metal machine has been made possible.

It can autonomously move and accelerate with an increase in temperature. When dividing a large running liquid metal vehicle into several smaller ones, each of them can still maintains its traveling state along the original track. If several dispersive vehicles moved close to each other, they can coalesce seamlessly, and then still kept moving forward.

American science-fiction cinema fans are either intrigued or horrified by this notion.

Turmeric, the familiar yellow spice common in Indian and Asian cooking, may play a therapeutic role in oral cancers associated with human papillomavirus, according to new research published in ecancermedicalscience. One of the herb's key active ingredients - an antioxidant called curcumin - appears to have a quelling effect on the activity of human papillomavirus (HPV).

HPV is a virus that promotes the development of cervical and oral cancer. There is no cure, but curcumin may offer a means of future control.

"Turmeric has established antiviral and anti-cancer properties," says corresponding author Dr. Alok Mishra of Emory University. "And according to our new findings, we could say that it's good for oral health too."

The brains of babies 'light up' like adults when exposed to the same painful stimulus, according to a small brain imaging study, and that suggests babies experience pain much like adults.

The study looked at 10 healthy infants aged between one and six days old and 10 healthy adults aged 23-36 years. Infants were recruited from the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and adult volunteers were Oxford University staff or students.

It's a dilemma many working parents: your child has a cough or a cold, do you send them to daycare?

Researchers from the University of Bristol have investigated the process of decision-making that parents go through when faced with this situation and find that parents viewed coughs and colds as less serious and not as contagious as sickness and diarrhea symptoms. This resulted in parents sending their child to daycare with a respiratory tract infection (RTI), which can result in the spread of similar illnesses in the wider community. 

The mosquito transmitted Chikungunya virus, which causes Chikungunya fever, is spreading continuously. No vaccine is so far available. Researchers of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut have experimentally recombined segments of the virus surface protein E2, thus creating artificial proteins. The domain generated that way - "sAB+" - was able to confer a protective effect against Chikungunya virus to the animal. An immunization by means of this small protein fragment could thus provide a suitable approach to developing a Chikungunya vaccine.

Scientists have discovered that neurons use minor "DNA surgeries" to toggle their activity levels all day, every day, and since these activity levels are important in learning, memory and brain disorders, it could shed light on a range of important questions. 

"We used to think that once a cell reaches full maturation, its DNA is totally stable, including the molecular tags attached to it to control its genes and maintain the cell's identity," says Hongjun Song, Ph.D., a professor of neurology and neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Institute for Cell Engineering. "This research shows that some cells actually alter their DNA all the time, just to perform everyday functions."

Bees play an invaluable role in maintaining biodiversity and in pollinating the crops that feed the world, so it is essential to improve our understanding of their biology and to investigate how they respond to environmental threats. Despite their often slow and apparently bumbling flights from flower to flower, bumblebees are anything but lazy. With over 250 bumblebee species globally, these important insects perform the laborious task of pollinating flowers in both wild and agricultural settings. A large number of fruits and vegetables would be missing from our plates had a bumblebee not done its job.