Testing a new therapeutic intervention such as a drug or surgical procedure on human subjects is not an option so the vast majority are first tested on animals and only when they have been established in those trials can human trials be considered.

But in recent years cultural campaigns against animal testing have increased, making researchers increasingly leery of them. That means size constraints and limited statistical power, and as a result the scientific literature contains many studies that are either uncertain in their outcomes or even contradictory.

If the Sun's outer atmosphere - corona - is so hot, why does it always look so cool?

The Sun's visible surface is 'only' 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but as you move outward the temperature shoots up to millions of degrees. It's like a campfire that feels hotter the farther away you stand. That defies common sense, but so do dogs named Checkers and Esther Williams swimming pools so let's talk about coronal loops.

By the time Sandy hit New Jersey and New York, it had been reduced to a tropical storm but its rare angle of approach still meant a lot of devastation.

Environmentalists in New York are resistant to creating barriers against future storms, like subway doors that can prevent flooding, and seawalls, but the stories of two residential beach communities on the New Jersey shore provide compelling evidence.

While America has dramatically dematerialized its environmental footprint in recent decades, producing far more food on far less land than 30 years ago, that's not true for the rest of the world. 

Heavy financial incentives in places like Europe - which accounts for 85% of the agricultural subsidies for the entire world - mean there is no reason to embrace modern science and technology. But a new paper notes that allowing land use to be determined purely by those agricultural constituencies results in considerable financial and environmental costs to the public. 

Scientists have revealed the genetic secrets of how a small bird, Parus humilis
 (ground tit) can survive in one of the most hostile environments on earth - the Tibetan plateau, the largest high-altitude land mass in the world.

The study found molecular signatures in the ground tit genome which reveal how it copes with the extreme living conditions of this habitat, said co-authors Professor David Lambert and Dr. Sankar Subramanian from Griffith University. 

New evidence is helping to solve the mystery surrounding a collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet 23 million years ago.

The surface of the East Antarctic ice sheet is so cold that models can only simulate its collapse by applying a significant climatic warming. Yet numerous lines of evidence suggest that 23 million years ago the Antarctic ice sheet decayed in size as changes in Earth's orbit around the Sun drove more subtle changes in Earth's seasons.

Scientists from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences analyzed fossil "foraminifera". These microscopic animals live in the ocean - on death their shells collect on the seafloor making a geological record of the past.