The body contains two types of fat cells, white and brown.

White fat serves to store excess calories until they're needed by the body while brown adipocytes actually burn fat by turning it into heat. Ever since it was discovered that adult humans harbor appreciable amounts of brown fat, investigators have been working to better understand its thermogenic fat-burning properties with the ultimate goal of developing novel therapies to combat obesity and diabetes. 

Now, researchers have demonstrated that the transcription factor IRF4 (interferon regulatory factor 4) plays a key role in brown fat's thermogenic process, regulating energy expenditure and cold tolerance.  

For hibernating mammals, the pre-winter months are a race to accumulate enough energy reserves to last until spring.

But what about offspring born late in the year? They have less time to store energy. Austrian scientists have discovered that power-napping can help late-born dormice overcome these unfavorable odds.

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Arthur on July 2 at 2:50 PM EDT on July 2nd, it saw a cloud-covered eye as the storm was on the way to becoming a hurricane.  

This visible image of Tropical Storm Arthur was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite. Arthur's center was over the Atlantic Ocean and east of Florida's northeast coast.

By 5 AM EDT on July 3, Arthur's eye had formed but remained cloud covered even as the storm hit hurricane-strength with maximum sustained winds near 75 MPH.  

Motörhead concert goers may have to sign a waiver before they buy tickets. If that band were in California, they would have to wear a Proposition 65 warning on their shirts.

Why? Because they can give you brain damage, according to a Case Report published in The Lancet. Ariyan Pirayesh Islamian and colleagues from the Hannover Medical School, detail the case of a man who developed a chronic subdural hematoma (bleeding in the brain) after headbanging at a Motörhead concert.

Many traits unique to humans are thought to have originated in the genus Homo between 2.4 and 1.8 million years ago in Africa.

What are the evolutionary factors that drove them?

A large brain, long legs, the ability to craft tools and prolonged maturation periods were all thought to have evolved together at the start of the Homo lineage as African grasslands expanded and Earth's climate became cooler and drier. However, new climate and fossil evidence analyzed by a team of researchers suggests that these traits did not arise as a single package. Rather, several key ingredients once thought to define Homo evolved in earlier Australopithecus ancestors between 3 and 4 million years ago, while others emerged significantly later.

The earthquakes in central Oklahoma since 2009 are likely attributable to subsurface wastewater injection at a handful of disposal wells -
Oklahoma earthquakes constitute nearly half of all central and eastern U.S. seismicity from 2008 to 2013, many occurring in areas of high-rate water disposal.

These are legacy drilling operations, not modern natural gas fracking.

Acoustic vibrations – sound waves – are produced by radiation pressure inside stars. While physicists have long posited that young stars vibrate differently than older stars, a new study says it is the first to confirm these predications using concrete data from outer space. 

First author Konstanze Zwintz, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven's Institute for Astronomy, and her colleagues studied the vibrations of 34 stars aged under 10 million years and sized between one and four times the mass of our sun.