We hear a lot about carbon storage and the impact on the atmosphere if CO2 is release during warming, but how does that work?

Carbon is not evenly distributed in soil, instead the kinds of carbon hot spots that matter are found on about 20 percent of mineral surfaces, according to a new paper. Studies have established that carbon binds to tiny mineral particles and in a new paper researchers show that the surface of the minerals plays just as important a role as their size.

"The carbon binds to minerals that are just a few thousandths of a millimeter in size – and it accumulates there almost exclusively on rough and angular surfaces," explains Prof. Ingrid Kögel-Knabner,
Technische Universitaet Muenchen

One of the best arguments for using science to allow people to grow food in difficult climates, rather than having wealthier nations donate it to them, is that wealth leads to better lives in lots of ways. Agriculture made Europe and the United States and countries with strong food production healthier and then wealthier.

But health and wealth may still be related in developed nations as well. A new paper led by San Diego State University School of Public Health research professor John W.

Dinosaur fossils are exceptionally rare in the Arabian Peninsula but researchers have uncovered the first record of dinosaurs from Arabia itself.

What is now dry desert was once a beach littered with the bones and teeth of ancient marine reptiles and dinosaurs. A string of vertebrae from the tail of a huge "Brontosaurus-like" sauropod, together with some shed teeth from a carnivorous theropod represent the first formally identified dinosaur fossils from Arabia, and were found in the north-western part of the dictatorship run by the Al-Saud family, along the coast of the Red Sea.

Though the War on Drugs has been a complete failure, and led to making poor people poorer and the rich in that market richer, scholars are touting the War on Cigarettes as a complete success - 8 million lives saved, they estimate.

Welcome to the first big solar flare of 2014.

The sun emitted a significant solar flare peaking at 1:32 p.m. EST on Jan.7, 2014. This is the first significant flare of 2014 and follows on the heels of mid-level flare earlier in the day. Each flare was centered over a different area of a large sunspot group currently situated at the center of the sun, about half way through its 14-day journey across the front of the disk along with the rotation of the sun.  

An in vivo study reveals how a protein in the brain, alpha2/delta-1, helps regulate food intake and body weight and may help explain why medications that are prescribed for epilepsy and other conditions that interfere with this protein, such as gabapentin and pregabalin, can cause weight gain.

The alpha2/delta-1 protein has not been linked previously to obesity but the team led by Maribel Rios, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of neuroscience at Tufts University School of Medicine, found that alpha2/delta-1 facilitates the function of another protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).