A study of Italians who consume a diet rich in resveratrol — the compound found in red wine, dark chocolate and berries — finds they live no longer than and are just as likely to develop cardiovascular disease or cancer as those who eat a regular diet.

Multiple lines of evidence incorporating 40 years of observations that six massive glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector "have passed the point of no return", a worrisome sign for melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Those glaciers already contribute to sea level rise, releasing as much ice into the ocean each year as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet does. They contain enough ice to boost the global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said the findings will require that current predictions of sea level rise be revised upward.

Is it The Day After Tomorrow imagery that environmentalists and a lot of journalists like to create?

What percentage of plants in the world are woody?

There is an optimum size for electrical networks if you want to avoid blackouts - and that does not mean making things better and more redundant. 

Being the right size is a common topic in fields like biology. In 1928, geneticist John Haldane wrote the essay "On being the right size" in which he stated that "For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form".
This became known as Haldane's Principle.

It applies to power networks also, according to the results of a study done by researchers at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Iowa State University.

The astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli first described them as 'canali' in the 19th century. A conspicuous net-like system of deep gorges known as the Noctis Labyrinthus is clearly visible on Mars' equatorial region.

The gorge system, in turn, leads into another massive canyon, the Valles Marineris, which is 4,000 km long, 200 km wide and 7 km deep. Both of these together would span the US completely from east to west.

These gorges resemble terrestrial canyons formed by water so most researchers assumed that immense flows of water must have carved the Noctis Labyrinthus and the Valles Marineris into the surface of Mars. Or perhaps tectonic activity had created the largest rift valley on a planet in our solar system.

A new robot is capable of reacting quickly and catching objects with complex shapes, like bottles and tennis rackets, in less than 5/100ths of a second.

The robot arm measures about 1.5 meters long, has three joints and a hand with four fingers. It was programmed at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
 (LASA) and designed to test robotic solutions for capturing moving objects.

Very recently, a combination of the precise measurements of the mass of the top quark obtained by the CDF and DZERO experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron collider with those produced by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN LHC collider has been produced, obtaining a result of 173.34 GeV, which surprised nobody -of course- with a very small total error bar: 0.76 GeV, a mere 760 MeV, not even a proton's mass.

While most of Antarctica is remaining cold, rapid increases in summer ice melt, glacier retreat and ice shelf collapses are being observed in Antarctic Peninsula, where the stronger winds passing through Drake Passage are making the climate warm exceptionally quickly.

Until this study, published in Nature Climate Change, Antarctic climate observations were available only from the middle of last century.

By analysing ice cores from Antarctica, along with data from tree rings and lakes in South America, Dr Abram and her colleagues were able to extend the history of the westerly winds back over the last millennium.

"The Southern Ocean winds are now stronger than at any other time in the past 1,000 years," Abram said.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Children with autism experience deficits in a type of immune cell that protects the body from infection. Called granulocytes, the cells exhibit one-third the capacity to fight infection and protect the body from invasion compared with the same cells in children who are developing normally.

The cells, which circulate in the bloodstream, are less able to deliver crucial infection-fighting oxidative responses to combat invading pathogens because of dysfunction in their tiny energy-generating organelles, the mitochondria.

The study is published online in the journal Pediatrics.