Scientists from the Magma and Volcanoes Laboratory (CNRS/IRD/Université Blaise Pascal) and the European Synchrotron, the ESRF, have recreated the extreme conditions 600 to 2900 km below the Earth's surface to investigate the melting of basalt in the oceanic tectonic plates. They exposed microscopic pieces of rock to these extreme pressures and temperatures while simultaneously studying their structure with the ESRF's extremely powerful X-ray beam. The results show that basalt produced on the ocean floor has a melting temperature lower than the peridotite which forms the Earth's mantle.

Sorry Australia, you can no longer lay claim to the origins of the iconic New Zealand kiwi - the kiwi's closest relative is not the emu. 

Instead, the diminutive kiwi is most closely related to the extinct Madagascan elephant bird – a 2-3 meter tall, 275 kg giant. And surprisingly, a new study in Science concluded, both of these flightless birds once flew.

A new study by the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), has solved a 150-year-old evolutionary mystery about the origins of the giant flightless "ratite" birds, such as the emu and ostrich, which are found across the southern continents. This group contains some of the world's largest birds – such as the extinct giant moa of New Zealand and elephant birds of Madagascar.

It's easy to complain about child obesity but one way to help solve it is to have kids do more exercise in ways that don't feel like exercise; like walking or biking to school.

Yet parents, the people most likely to be concerned about child health, are the biggest obstacle to letting kids walk or bike to school, according to research led at the University of Strathclyde. 

If we care about saving lives, we'd be better off funding more mental health services than we are taxing and penalizing cigarettes companies in order to subsidize the industry that has been built to market against cigarettes.

Serious mental illnesses reduce life expectancy by 10-20 years, worse than that for heavy smoking.

It's no longer a certainty that American mothers will get custody over their children during a divorce. In fact, if Wisconsin Court Records of the past 20 years are anything to go by, joint custody is becoming the norm. So says Maria Cancian and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US, whose findings are published in Springer's journal Demography.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Researchers at MIT have discovered a new way of harnessing temperature gradients in fluids to propel objects. In the natural world, the mechanism may influence the motion of icebergs floating on the sea and rocks moving through subterranean magma chambers.

The discovery is reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters by associate professor of mechanical engineering Thomas Peacock and four others. The finding was an unexpected outcome of research on other effects of temperature differences, such as the way winds form over glaciers in a valley, Peacock says.