The intensity of earth's magnetic field has been weakening in the last couple of hundred years, leading some to claim that its polarity might be about to flip.

But the field's intensity is coming down from an abnormal high rather than approaching a reversal. And despite Doomsday prophecies stating otherwise, humans have lived through dips in the field's intensity before. Linking reversals in the more distant past to species extinctions is just speculation that can't be proved or disproved, which makes them ideal fodder for scary stories about nature.

Researcher Christian Duval, PhD, and his team have developed a new, simple and non-invasive approach to create a biomechanical and cognitive profile of football players and more quickly and accurately detect concussions in these individuals. Christian Duval and his post-doctoral student Hung Nguyen, PhD, work at the Research Centre of the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal, which is affiliated with the University of Montreal. They presented their preliminary research findings at the International Congress on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support, which was held in Lisbon from November 15 to 17.

A carbon tax of just $11 would offset the CO2 emissions from tourism, according to a paper in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Every time people go on vacation, or journalists go off to climate conferences like the one in Paris, they are using fossil fuel energy. The total emissions from vacations like that would be the sixth largest emitter of CO2 if it were a country - five percent of total human-made emissions of CO2.   

Biologists have induced one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm without altering the genomic sequence. The work reveals physiological circuits as a new kind of epigenetics - information existing outside of genomic sequence - that determines large-scale anatomy.  

The most direct information about the interior of the earth comes from measuring how seismic acoustic waves--such as those created by earthquakes -- travel through the earth. Those measurements show that 95% of the earth's core is liquid. But, scientists also want to know the composition of the liquid, and that is harder. Now, in research published in Nature Communications, scientists from the Materials Dynamics Laboratory at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, along with collaborators from the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Earth-Life Science Institute and other institutes, have succeeded in measuring the speed of sound in mixtures of liquid iron and carbon in extreme conditions, allowing limits to be set on the core composition.

Scientists drilling into the ocean floor have for the first time found out what happens when one tectonic plate first gets pushed under another.

The international expedition drilled into the Pacific ocean floor and found distinctive rocks formed when the Pacific tectonic plate changed direction and began to plunge under the Philippine Sea Plate about 50 million years ago.

"It's a bit like a rugby scrum, with two rows of forwards pushing on each other. Then one side goes down and the other side goes over the top," said study leader Professor Richard Arculus, from The Australian National University (ANU).