The Earth has a magnetic field that functions as an in-built force-field against galactic cosmic rays, particles from space which prompt a chain-reaction of events in thunderclouds that trigger lightning bolts. 

The only thing more powerful than our magnetic field is that of the Sun, and it may be playing a part in the generation of lightning strikes on Earth by temporarily 'bending' the Earth's magnetic field and allowing more energetic particles to enter the upper atmosphere. Over a five year period, the UK experienced around 50% more lightning strikes and researchers found that correlates to when the Earth's magnetic field was skewed by the Sun's own magnetic field.

By Amanda Bates, University of Southampton

We live in a time when our climate is warming more rapidly than ever before. Rising temperature and associated changes in weather are driving shifts in the distributions of species on Earth.

Some are thriving in these new climate conditions and have even moved into new regions that were historically inhospitable.

One concern for us humans is how harmful species – diseases or pests – are responding to a changing climate.

By Sue Thomas, Bournemouth University

Looking over the landscape I could see an old tree standing frozen and seemingly dead, its branches coated with icy rime. Around it, mossy grass and small rocks lay beneath a coating of snow and in the distance glistening waterfalls tumbled down the sides of whitened mountains.

It looked like the wilds of Ireland in wintertime, but the view existed only in my phone. My task, using a handheld biosensor called PIP, was to bring summer to this deeply cold outdoor scene by the powers of mental relaxation.

In bean sprouts, a collection of amino acids called a protein complex allows them to grow longer in the darkness than in the light. In humans, there is a similar protein complex called CSN, and its subunit CSN6 is now believed to be a cancer-causing gene that impacts activity of another gene (Myc) tied to tumor growth.

The LHCb experiment collaborators at the Large Hadron Collider have announced discovery of two new particles in the baryon family.

The particles, known as the Xi_b'^- and Xi_b*^-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*⁰, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. 

By Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia

It’s official: men are better writers than women.

The news came as something of a shock to a hardened feminist such as myself, but a quick survey of prescribed and suggested texts set for senior English in most Australian states demonstrates this is a fact routinely taught to teenagers in school.

It is commonly believed that one key issue in brain again is that it becomes less flexible - plastic - and that learning may therefore become more difficult.

A new study contradicts that and shows that plasticity did occur in seniors who learned a task well, it just occurred in a different part of the brain than in younger people.

When many older subjects learned a new visual task, the researchers found, they unexpectedly showed a significantly associated change in the white matter of the brain. White matter is the the brain's "wiring," or axons, sheathed in a material called myelin that can make transmission of signals more efficient. Younger learners, meanwhile, showed plasticity in the cortex, where neuroscientists expected to see it.

Time is relative. What is a long time to humans is nothing to a mountain. Like humans, mountains usually burst on the scene, then they stand tall and finally age wears them down and their sharp features soften and they become grow shorter and rounder.

Not all mountains, though. The Gamburtsev Mountains in the middle of Antarctica look quite young for their age. Though the Gamburtsevs were discovered in the 1950s, they remained unexplored until government budget increases and few things left above ground to explore led scientists to fly ice-penetrating instruments over the mountains 60 years later.

On a quest to design an alternative to the complex approaches currently used to produce electrons within microwave electron guns, a team of researchers have demonstrated a plug-and-play solution capable of operating in a high-electric-field environment with a high-quality electron beam.

Unfamiliar with microwave electron guns? They provide a higher current and much higher quality electron beams than conventional DC guns for X-ray sources . Beams of this sort are also used in free-electron lasers, synchrotrons, linear colliders and wakefield accelerator schemes. But the electron emission mechanisms involved -- laser irradiation of materials (photocathodes) and heating of materials (thermionic cathodes) -- tend to be complex, bulky or extremely expensive.