President Obama, who was going to heal the Earth in his first term, didn't do much of that but he put climate change back on the table in his second inaugural address and a new national poll says public support for regulating greenhouse gas emissions is with him - just not with the ways he tried in his first term.

When you think of the South Pole, you probably don't think of garbage.  

Yet according to a report commissioned by the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) in Germany, the Antarctic is littered with leftovers from derelict experimental set-ups and field huts are slowly decomposing. Garbage containing dangerous chemicals, discarded oil cans and car batteries is lying in the open. Coastal waters and beaches are suffering oil-pollution as a result of poor handling of fuel at those science stations. 

A new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters analyzed seismic waves that bombarded Earth's core and indicates that two or more continent-sized chunks of rock are colliding as they move at the bottom of Earth's thick mantle, atop the thicker core some 1,800 miles beneath the Pacific. That is creating a Florida-sized zone of partly molten rock that may be the root of either of two kinds of massive eruptions far in the future:

• Hotspot plume supervolcano eruptions like those during the past 2 million years at Wyoming's Yellowstone caldera, which covered North America with volcanic ash.

Ever since Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger simultaneously killed and did not kill his unfortunate cat, fellow scientists have been using quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and particles.

Bt corn, which is engineered to produce the bacterial toxin, Bt, that organic farmers spray on foods all of the time, is better than a pesticide because is naturally resists attack by the corn rootworm, a pest that feeds on roots and can cause losses of up to $1 billion annually.

It also resulted in an unexpected benefit; the Bt trait has also boosted corn yields. But why?

In a new paper,  researchers assess the complete landscape of a cancer's kinome expression and determine which kinases are acting up in a particular tumor.  Since the proteins are relatively easy to target with drugs and plenty of kinase inhibitors already exist, the work shows that those particular kinases can be targeted with drugs and can even lead to potentially combining multiple drugs to target multiple kinases. 

The researchers looked at RNA sequencing data from 482 samples of both cancerous and non-cancerous tissue and identified the most highly expressed kinases in individual breast cancer and pancreatic cancer samples. They found certain common themes.

Two Asian charities have joined forces with the U.S. National Funeral Directors' Association (NFDA) to get people to start thinking about deathcare rather than healthcare.

No, deathcare is not another tine in Britain's expanding Liverpool Death Pathway fork, it is a chance to think about the way your final exit is made, assuming you were told you are on the NHS' mandatory road to demise in time to plan.