Worldwide installations of solar and wind power has skyrocketed. Since 2009, the heyday of government subsidies, global solar photovoltaic installations have increased about 40 percent a year on average, and the installed capacity of wind turbines has doubled.

As the expansion of health care coverage becomes mandatory nationwide, people are looking to Massachusetts, which had already expanded health insurance coverage to nearly everyone in the state, for implications.

The answer may be a source of dread for states like California, where high taxes and an onerous business climate have caused most of the middle class to disappear: Emergency Room visits went up, even as uninsured visits went down, and that means higher cost.

The new report in the Annals of Emergency Medicine can't determine why they went up; perhaps people did not go before because they did not have coverage or perhaps people went more afterward because fewer private doctors accept their plans and the waiting period was too long.

In the 2012 election campaign, Mitt Romney was vilified for saying something everyone knew to be true and extrapolating motivation from it - that each party was going to get 47 percent of the vote no matter what and that dictated economic policy. Only 3 percent of the people on each side were really up for grabs, everyone else was voting for a ticket no matter who was on it.

States that have hunting industries have the best of both possible worlds; instead of having state union workers expensively managing wildlife, they get the public to do it - and pay for the privilege. That money is then used to pay for state biologists and conservation programs.

A forest in South Carolina, a supercomputer in Ohio and some glow-in-the-dark yarn have helped a team of field ecologists conclude that woodland corridors connecting patches of endangered plants not only increase dispersal of seeds from one patch to another, but also create wind conditions that can spread the seeds for much longer distances.

The idea for the study emerged from modern animal conservation practices, where landscape connectivity – the degree to which landscapes facilitate movement – is being used to counteract the impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation on animal movement.

In a study published today (19/3/2014) in the scientific journal Neuron, neuroscientists at the Champalimaud Foundation, in collaboration with neuroscientists from Harvard University, describe the first activity maps at the resolution of single cells and throughout the entire brain of behaving zebrafish.

Hungry dogs would be expected to choose alternatives leading to more food rather than less food. But just as with humans and monkeys, they sometimes show a "less is more" effect. Thus conclude Kristina Pattison and Thomas Zentall of the University of Kentucky in the US, who tested the principle by feeding baby carrots and string cheese to ten dogs of various breeds. The findings are published in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.

The research was conducted on dogs that would willingly eat cheese and baby carrots when offered, but showed a preference for the cheese. However, when given a choice between one slice of cheese, or the cheese together with a piece of carrot, nine of the ten dogs chose the cheese alone. That is, they chose less food over more food.

The world's leading particle collider experiments, Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have joined forces. Scientists from the four experiments involved — ATLAS, CDF, CMS and DZero — announced their joint findings on the mass of the top quark today at the Rencontres de Moriond international physics conference in Italy. 

They pooled their data analysis power to arrive at a new world's best value for the mass of the top quark of 173.34 plus/minus 0.76 GeV/c².

The genome of the loblolly pine is truly massive, aound seven times bigger than the human genome, making it the largest genome sequenced to date and the most complete conifer genome sequence ever published.

The achievement, described in GENETICS and Genome Biology, marks the first big test of a new analysis method that can speed up genome assembly by compressing the raw sequence data 100-fold.

Loblolly pine is the most commercially important tree species in the United States and the source of most American paper products. The tree is also being developed as a feedstock for biofuel. The genome sequence will help scientists breed improved varieties and understand the evolution and diversity of plants.