With the official start of hurricane season approaching on June 1, news reports about the Deep Horizon oil spill that began fouling the Gulf last month have raised questions about how a hurricane might complicate the unfolding disaster.

A new study in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that hurricanes could snap offshore oil pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico and other hurricane-prone areas, since the storms whip up strong underwater currents.

These pipelines could crack or rupture unless they are buried or their supporting foundations are built to withstand these hurricane-induced currents. "Major oil leaks from damaged pipelines could have irreversible impacts on the ocean environment," the researchers warn in their study.

The more TV parents watch, the more their children watch and are less active as a result, say the authors of a new study in BMC Public Health. 

The study found that higher parental TV viewing was associated with an increased risk of high levels of TV viewing for both boys and girls. For girls, the relative risk of watching more than four hours of TV per day was 3.67 times higher if the girl's parent watched two-four hours of TV per day, when compared to girls who watched less than two hours of TV per day.

A study in Current Biology has confirmed that the brain chemical dopamine plays a role in decision making by influencing our expectations of the pleasure associated with the outcomes of our choices.

Dopamine's role in reward learning and reward-seeking behavior has been established in animals, said Tali Sharot of University College London. In humans, however, much less was known. Her team recently found that when we imagine future events, activity in a dopamine-laden part of the brain tracks people's estimates of the expected pleasure to be derived from those events. Based on these findings, the researchers suspected that they could alter people's expectations, and with them their choices, by manipulating dopamine levels in the subjects' brains.

A team of researchers has developed a model that can recereate famous historical monuments. 
The project makes it possible to create three-dimensional plans with colour images of historical and artistic places of interest. The data is recorded by laser scanners that take the maximum number of geometric measurements from a minimum number of positions
"With this methodology an exact model of the monuments or places of interest can be obtained in a virtual way", Pedro Martín-Lerones, co-author of the study and researcher at the Cartif Foundation in the Technological Park of Boecillo (Valladolid), explains to SINC.

Scientists have developed a new influenza vaccine that may one day eliminate the need for seasonal flu shots. The new findings were published in the inaugural issue of mBio.

The current seasonal influenza vaccine is strain-specific, targeting the globular head of the hemaglutinin (HA) molecule on the surface of the influenza virus. This globular head is highly variable and constantly changing from strain to strain. Each flu season presents a different strain, making it necessary to adjust the vaccine each year.

The 20th Century was one of the driest for Northwest Africa in Nine Centuries, according to a new study from Arizona State University. Droughts in the late 20th century rivaled some of North Africa's major droughts of centuries past.

The first multi-century drought reconstruction that includes Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia shows frequent and severe droughts during the 13th and 16th centuries and the latter part of the 20th century. The study will be published in Climate Dynamics.

Researchers reconstructed northwest Africa's climate history by using the information recorded in tree rings. The oldest trees sampled contain climate data from the medieval period. One tree-ring sample from Morocco dates back to the year 883.