Tropical rabbitfish have devastated algal forests in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and pose a major threat to the entire Mediterranean basin if their distribution continues to expand as the climate warms, according to a new study
in the Journal of Ecology.

The members of the team surveyed more than 1000 kilometers of coastline in Turkey and Greece, where two species of rabbitfish have become dominant since they moved into the region via the Suez Canal.

The Tambora volcanic eruption in 1815 is famous for its impact on climate worldwide. As a result, the year 1816 was given memorable names such as 'Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death', the 'Year of the Beggar' and the 'Year Without a Summer' because of cold weather and unseasonable frosts, crop failure and famine across Europe and North America. 

Some even claim the conditions inspired literary works such as Byron's 'Darkness' and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Anyone who tells you they have a super food or a potion to impact a complex trait is sellinf you something. Life is rarely simple. The things we care about most, from crop yields to disease risks, are instead "complex traits."

Human height is a textbook example of a complex trait while attributes like risk for a particular human disease are shaped by multiple genetic and environmental influences.

The value of the Science 2.0 approach, and the wealth of Big Data that geneticists now have available, is in finding the genes involved and then quantifying their importance when other circumstances are factored in.  

For obvious reasons spaceflight has been reserved for governments and the very wealthy. And when it comes to governments, the criteria are stringent. They will get thousands of applications per year and quickly weed out most of them. Predominantly you have to already be a government employee to have any chance of being an astronaut so that is a big disqualification for much of the best and brightest in America.