There were a number of reasons carbon dioxide got singled out as a primary contributor to global warming and a key one was that it was the easiest problem to fix in Europe - more nuclear power and closing Soviet-era factories made goals achievable.  The US had no quick fix, since environmentalists dislike nuclear power in America, and with world leader China exempt from emissions caps, the effort to curb CO2 basically stalled.

A giant galaxy, so distant that it is seen as it was 12.8 billion years ago, is as large as the Milky Way and contains a supermassive black hole with at least a billion times as much matter as our Sun.

The discovery, in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues, lays claim to the most distant supermassive black hole ever found.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found what could be the signal of ideal wave 'surfing' conditions for individual particles within the massive turbulent ocean of the solar wind, a discovery that could give a new insight into just how energy is dissipated in solar system sized plasmas such as the solar wind and could provide significant clues to scientists developing fusion power which relies on plasmas.

The research, led by Khurom Kiyanai and Professor Sandra Chapman in the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, looked at data from the Cluster spacecraft quartet to obtain a comparatively “quiet” slice of the solar wind as it progressed over an hour travelling covering roughly 2,340,000 Kilometers.

Sherlock Holmes used a variety of tools  to deduce what he needed to know about people in general and criminals in specific.    It turns out he could learn a lot by how people act in a virtual reality setting playing a form of 'hide and seek', say two University of Alberta researchers. 

Experimental psychologist Marcia Spetch and computer scientist Vadim Bulitko recently published an article in Learning and Motivation say they mapped the decision-making process involved in hiding and searching for objects, which could obviously lead to more realistic game environments and even new tools for law enforcement.

Protein S, a well-known anticoagulant protein, also contributes to the formation and function of healthy blood vessels, say researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.   They found that mice lacking protein S suffered massive blood clots, but also had defective blood vessels that allow blood cells to leak into the surrounding tissue.

There are more than 200 known human mutations and polymorphisms in the gene coding for protein S, which was arbitrarily named after Seattle, the city of its discovery. The resulting deficiencies predispose carriers to deep venous thrombosis, strokes at an early age, recurrent miscarriages, and pre-eclampsia, and are associated with several autoimmune diseases, most prominently systemic lupus erythematosus. 

The magic of brain imaging has allowed researchers to correlate a thicker cortex in Tetris players with increased brain efficiency due to ... playing Tetris.   The researchers from Mind Research Network in Albuquerque writing in BMC Research Notes used brain imaging and Tetris to investigate whether practice makes the brain efficient because it increases gray matter.