If left unaddressed, the U.S. government's growing debt will inevitably limit America's future wealth and risk a disruptive fiscal crisis, claims a new report from the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration. The report lays out several tax and spending options that would stabilize the national debt within a decade as well as a set of simple tests to determine whether any proposed federal budget would lead to long-term fiscal stability.

The rate of smoking among nursing students is twice that of the general population, indicates a survey of over 800 new nursing students published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing. Busy bodies in the health community argue the results indicate that smoking cessation programs should be incorporated into nursing studies. They say that smoking among healthcare professionals undermines the credibility of anti-smoking campaigns aimed at the general public.

 The Tibetan Plateau—thought to be the primary source of heat that drives the South Asian monsoon—may have far less of an effect than moist, warm air insulated over continental India by the Himalayas and other surrounding mountains, say Harvard climate scientists writing this week in Nature.

The team says that understanding the monsoon's proper origin, especially in the context of global climate change, is crucial for the future sustainability of the region. The findings also have broad implications for how the Asian climate may have responded to mountain uplift in the past, and for how it might respond to surface changes in the coming decades, the researchers say.

Conservation efforts aimed at protecting Gorillas And Elephants in African parks and reserves  are well intentioned but are often based on incorrect assumptions about the local culture, say Purdue University anthropologists. In a new Conservation Biology paper, the team says that understanding local human communities is key to protecting the wildlife they live alongside.

While most researchers and policy makers are looking to new technologies to slow the pace of climate change, scientists from Cornell University and the University of New South Wales are reporting that "biochar" — a material that the Amazonian Indians used to enhance soil fertility centuries ago — has potential in the modern world to help slow global climate change. Mass production of biochar could capture and sock away carbon that otherwise would wind up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. .

Drinking green tea could modulate the effects of smoking on lung cancer, suggests a hospital-based, randomized study presented at the AACR-IASLC Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer.

Researchers enrolled 170 patients with lung cancer and 340 healthy patients as controls.  The team administered questionnaires to obtain demographic characteristics, cigarette smoking habits, green tea consumption, dietary intake of fruits and vegetables, cooking practices and family history of lung cancer. They also performed genotyping on insulin-like growth factors as polymorphisms on the following insulin-like growth factors: IGF1, IGF2 and IGFBP3, which have all been reported to be associated with cancer risk.