U.S. Forest Service scientists at the Center for Urban Forest Research are providing online software that can show users how much carbon dioxide an urban tree in California has sequestered in its lifetime and the past year.   The Tree Carbon Calculator is free and programmed in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that provides carbon-related information for a single tree in one of six California climate zones.

It can be found at the U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Resource Center Web site, http://www.fs.fed.us/ccrc/topics/urban-forests/ or the Center for Urban Forest Research Web site, http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/programs/cufr/ 

A warm-up program that focuses on improving strength, balance, core stability and muscular awareness cuts injury in female footballers by a third and severe injuries by almost a half, according to research published on bmj.com today.

In an accompanying editorial, John Brooks an injury expert for the Rugby Football Union, says that people participating in any sport at all levels should adopt a warm-up program like this to reduce injury. Previous studies investigating the effect of warming up on the risk of injury have focused on key warm-up elements — raising the core temperature, stretching the muscles used, and conducting movement specific exercises — but the effect on injury has been unclear until now.

Many people may not know that this past weekend marked the 400th anniversary of John Milton’s birth (he was born on December 9th, 1608). “But Milton remains incredibly relevant to us today,” says Shannon Miller, professor and chair of the English department at Temple University. 

Milton is the seventeenth-century English poet who is considered equal or superior to William Shakespeare. “He is important to us both for the issues of political revolution in which he was invested and for his poem Paradise Lost which explores issues of political revolution within a narrative about the fall from Eden,” says Miller.

Naturally, people found a way to link Milton to the recent election of Barack Obama - and one pundit even found a way to make John McCain into Satan.  

A supplement in the December 2008 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that reviews the history and development of high fructose corn syrup finds no scientific support for the hypothesis that high fructose corn syrup is causally linked to obesity in the United States or globally any more or less than other caloric sweeteners.

We've all had it happen; you're sitting in class, hopelessly unprepared because you've been writing a D&D campaign or plotting ways to take over the world when, out of nowhere, the teacher calls upon you to come to the front the room and solve a math problem. In front of everyone.

How you respond to that says a lot about you, and 'math anxiety' may be a real phenomenon, according to a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science.  University of Chicago psychologist Sian L. Beilock examines some recent research looking at why being stressed about math can result in poor performance in solving problems.

Imagine tiny cracks in your patio table healing by themselves, or the first small scratch on your new car disappearing by itself. This and more may be possible with self-healing coatings being developed at the University of Illinois. 

The new coatings are designed to better protect materials from the effects of environmental exposure. Applications range from automotive paints and marine varnishes to the thick, rubbery coatings on patio furniture and park benches.