Air pollutants which travel from a country like China, the world's top producer of CO2 who also happens to be exempt from  Kyoto because they insist they are a developing nation,  impact the USA and then on to Europe, says a new report by the National Research Council.

Poor air quality is most strongly a result of local emissions but the influence of non-domestic pollution sources may grow as emissions from developing countries increase and become relatively more important as a result of tightening environmental protection standards in industrialized countries. 

Should you use sand for stream restoration?    Common wisdom said no, because it disrupts salmon spawning, researchers have successfully built and maintained a scale model of a living meandering gravel-bed river in the lab and found that sand is indispensable for helping to build point bars and to block off cut-off channels and chutes--tributaries that might start and detract from the flow and health of the stream.

The significance of vegetation for slowing erosion and reinforcing banks has been known for a long time, but this is the first time it has been scientifically demonstrated as a critical component in meandering.

Think shoes aren't important for women?   You would be wrong, though perhaps not for the reasons you want to believe.

A recent Arthritis Care&Research study says that women who make poor shoe choices early in life are at greater risk for foot pain in later years. Apparently, men do not experience the same foot pain as women, though that could be because men never dance backward in heels.

If you were following actual science during the alternative energy debate of the 1990s and early 2000s, you were probably concerned about the irrational zeal of activists and politicians like Al Gore who wanted to embrace anything that meant fewer fossil fuels - specifically, ethanol.

Billions of dollars in subsidies since 2005 and mandates on its usage have shown us that ethanol was wrong all along.  And it is apparently only beginning to be realized how wrong.

Even more of the fertilizers and pesticides used to grow corn would find their way into nearby water sources if ethanol demands lead to planting more acres in corn, according to a Purdue University study.

Psychiatrist Szabolcs Kéri of Semmelweis University in Hungary looked into an urban legend about the link between creativity and mental illness and says there may be something to it.  
 
He focused his research on neuregulin 1, a gene that normally plays a role in a variety of brain processes, including development and strengthening communication between neurons. However, a variant of this gene (or genotype) is associated with a greater risk of developing mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

An RNA-powered nanomotor has become the engine for an artificial pore able to transmit nanoscale material through a membrane, the next step in research on using nanomotors to package and deliver therapeutic agents directly to infected cells. Eventually this could enable use of nanoscale medical devices to diagnose and treat diseases.

In a study led by University of Cincinnati (UC) biomedical engineering professor Peixuan Guo, PhD, members of the team inserted the modified core of a nanomotor, a microscopic biological machine, into a lipid membrane. The resulting channel enabled them to move both single- and double-stranded DNA through the membrane.  The engineered channel could have applications in nano-sensing, gene delivery, drug loading and DNA sequencing, says Guo.