The story of some violent historic earthquakes may need to be revisited, according to a study published in the April issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). Seismologists rely on written accounts, mostly local newspaper articles, to judge how strongly the ground shook during earthquakes that predate the use of current instrumentation. Those news accounts have proven to be misleading, say scientists, and reliance upon them must be tempered when evaluating the size of past earthquakes.

We are used to hearing about the effects of climate change in terms of unusual animal behaviour, such as altering patterns of fish and bird migration. However, scientists at the University of Birmingham are trying out an alternative bio-indicator – the king penguin – to investigate whether they can be used to monitor the effects of climate change.

“If penguins are travelling further or diving deeper for food, that tells us something about the availability of particular fish in regions of the Antarctic.

In the hands of the wrong person, power can be dangerous. That's especially the case in the workplace, where the abuse of power can lead to sexual harassment.

Issues of power, workplace culture and the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication associated with sexual harassment were the focus of a study by Debbie Dougherty, assistant professor of communication in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Working with a large healthcare organization in the Midwest, Dougherty examined the question: why does sexual harassment occur?

Will you lose weight and keep it off if you diet? No, probably not, UCLA researchers report in the April issue of American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association.

"You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back," said Traci Mann, UCLA associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. "We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weight regain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people."

Researchers at Delft University of Technology can predict how nanostructuring – the extreme reduction of structure – will affect the performance of Li-ion batteries. The nanostructuring of battery materials is likely to be common practice in the future, but it is not always performance-enhancing. The research findings have recently been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Bacteria must talk to each other, in a sense. They use signals to inform neighbors whether to switch certain genes on or off and this allows them to adapt to changing circumstances.

What exactly do bacteria learn from the signal substances between them? There have been two theories: the release of signal substances is understood to be either a cooperative strategy to determine the cell density (quorum sensing) or – alternatively – a non-cooperative strategy in which the signal substance is only used to determine the dimensions of the space surrounding the cell (diffusion sensing). However, both theories have not been shown to work under natural conditions, which usually are much more complex than those in laboratory.