Exfoliation syndrome (XFS) is an eye condition that is a leading cause of secondary open-angle glaucoma and can lead to an increased risk of cataract and cataract surgery complications. 

California's water supply depends on a clean snow pack and healthy mountain lakes.  Because of geography, California cities are conducive to air pollution and a similar effect can be found in lakes. The lakes in the Sierra Nevada are the most sensitive lakes in the U.S. to acid rain, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The lakes receive a large amount of runoff in the spring from the melting snowpack. If the snowpack is polluted, the lakes will be polluted.

The most compelling argument for genetic modification is not accepting science or progressive ideals, it is that it has caused food production to dematerialize in dramatic fashion. Scientific optimization of plants, superior to all genetic modification schemes of the last 12,000 years, have allowed American farmers to raise more food on less land than was dreamed possible. 

There is a cultural tug of war happening in the developing world. Experts and policy makers want to embrace science but environmental groups promoting fear and doubt manage to scare the public. Yet there is a practical metric every farmer in India can see - ozone pollution in India damages enough food to feed 94 million people. 

By Helen King, The Open University

It wasn’t that long ago that it was believed that regular periods were essential for women's health and in their absence, a loss of blood through another orifice was a fair substitute.

In a classical Greek text linked to Hippocrates, the Aphorisms, it was written that “a nosebleed is a good thing if the menstrual period is suppressed”. So too was vomiting blood. And these beliefs lasted in western Europe until the middle of the 19th century.

But what was the theory behind what now seems a pretty alarming set of beliefs?

1. A build up of blood caused illness

Greenhouse gases, originating from natural sources, industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels, are the culprits behind current global warming fears. The most abundant among them is carbon dioxide, which made up 84% of the United State's greenhouse gases in 2012, and can linger in Earth's atmosphere for up to a thousand ears.

Countries all over the world are looking to reduce their carbon dioxide footprint but carbon dioxide is essentially a waste product with little immediate commercial value and large treatment costs. New low-cost technologies will be needed to incentivize greenhouse gas capture by industry.

Researchers from Japan have engineered a membrane with advanced features capable of removing harmful greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.  

Mathematical techniques that not only identify whether two data sets correlate, but also whether one drives the other, have allowed researchers to look at a lot of old data in new ways. Methods have been developed to try to identify and correct for bias in the fossil record but the new research suggests many of these correction methods may actually be misleading. 

The new results show that out of all the geological factors, only the area of preserved rock drives biodiversity. Therefore, the other geological factors – counts of fossil collections and geological formations – are not independent measures of bias in the fossil record.

A new supermassive dinosaur species with the most complete skeleton ever found of its type has been unveiled. Dreadnoughtus schrani was  85 feet long and weighed about 65 tons in life, making iy the largest land animal for which a body mass can be accurately calculated.

Its skeleton is exceptionally complete, with over 70 percent of the bones, excluding the head, represented. Because all previously discovered supermassive dinosaurs are known only from relatively fragmentary remains, Dreadnoughtus offers an unprecedented window into the anatomy and biomechanics of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth.

By Barbara Sahakian, University of Cambridge and Muzaffer Kaser, University of Cambridge

Two new species of sea-dwelling, mushroom-shaped organisms have been discovered. 

Scientists classify organisms based on shared characteristics using a taxonomic rank, including kingdom, phylum, and species. In 1986, the authors of this study collected organisms at 400 and 1000 meters deep on the south-east Australian continental slope and only just recently isolated two types of mushroom-shaped organisms that they couldn't classify into an existing phylum.