Soot and methane were little-considered factors in climate change models a decade ago but with the drop of CO2 in Western nations, activists have begun to worry about those. 

It would have been smart to factor them in all along. Every year, wildfires clear millions of hectares of land and emit around 34 percent of global soot mass into the atmosphere. In remote parts of Southeast Asia and Russia, these fires can contribute as much as 63 percent of regional soot mass. 

The PandaX experiment of China is located in a deep underground laboratory, shielded by 2,400 meters of low radioactive rocks to provide protection for PandaX against cosmic muons. It began operation in March but has no results yet, so they published a technical design report to show the Chinese government they are doing something.

Platonic solids are regular bodies in three dimensions, such as the cube and icosahedron, and have been known for millennia. They feature prominently in the natural world wherever geometry and symmetry are important, for instance in lattices and quasi-crystals, as well as fullerenes and viruses  

Platonic solids have counterparts in four dimensions. Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schlaefli and Alicia Boole Stott showed that there are six of them, five of which have very strange symmetries. Stott, the third daughter of mathematician George Boole, is best known for establishing the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four dimensions, had a unique intuition into the geometry of four dimensions, which she visualised via three-dimensional cross-sections.

Australia is working to repeal its unpopular carbon tax and replacement strategies to mitigate carbon emissions and stave off future climate change may bring a bonus - water savings. A new study says that the equivalent of one-third of Melbourne's water use could be saved each year through the implementation of efficiency measures.

Researchers at the Monash Sustainability Institute analyzed the water-saving potential of 74 options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions identified in the ClimateWorks Australia Low Carbon Growth Plan for Australia.  An analysis of options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions found energy efficiency measures reduced water consumption at the same time.

Some viruses can hide in our bodies for decades. How do they escape notice and destruction? They have 'fake' human proteins that trick our immune cells into thinking they belong. 

An international research team has developed a new method to analyze the global genome, or the metagenome of the intestinal microbiota. The intestinal microbiota is all the bacteria found in the digestive tract.  The metagenome corresponds to all the genes in these bacteria. 

They believe their method method markedly simplifies microbiome analysis and renders it more powerful.  The scientists have thus been able to sequence and assemble the complete genome of 238 intestinal bacteria, 75% of which were previously unknown.