Could alcohol abstinence campaigns like Dry January may do more harm than good?

The Dry January campaign estimates that last year over 2 million people cut down their drinking for January, but popular doesn't necessarily mean effective, and the claims lack rigorous evaluation. Like 'don't buy gas on Tuesday', it isn't really changing anything if people engage in the same behavior a little later.

While lithium-ion batteries have transformed our everyday lives, researchers are currently trying to find new chemistries that could offer even better energy possibilities. One of these chemistries, lithium-air, could promise greater energy density but has certain drawbacks as well.

Now, thanks to research at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, one of those drawbacks may have been overcome.

All previous work on lithium-air batteries showed the same phenomenon: the formation of lithium peroxide (Li2O2), a solid precipitate that clogged the pores of the electrode.

Farm to fork, locally grown and all of the other progressive terms for agriculture self-identification leave out one important fact: People would starve.

Seattle, for example could feed 4 percent of its population with P-Patches and backyard gardens teeming with kale. Organic agriculture for the masses is a popular myth but urban agriculture is a plain old pipe dream.

And 4 percent may be the high number, it could be more like 1 percent, according to a new University of Washington study - that's even if all viable backyard and public green spaces were converted to growing produce. 

Large ornamental structures in dinosaurs, such as horns and head crests are likely to have been used in sexual displays and to assert social dominance, according to a new analysis of Protoceratops carried out by scientists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

This is the first time scientists have linked the function of anatomy to sexual selection in dinosaurs.

In the 1990s, and more recently during the Obama administration, there has been a wave of protectionism about United States technology and science jobs, with calls to cut visas for foreign-born workers.

It's a modern demonization of Asiatics, minus the buck teeth caricatures. In reality, it is forbidden by law to pay substantially less to someone because they are not a citizen, so foreign scientists and engineers were not undercutting Americans. In the Clinton era, this protectionism directly led to the exportation of jobs overseas - but student visas never slowed down, so we trained foreign students in the best schools in the world and then forced them to go back home to compete with America instead of becoming Americans.

Though 90,000 out of every 100,000 years in recent geological cycles have been Ice Ages, and it has been 12,000 years since the last one, a new glacial inception hasn't happened.

That's because humanity has become a geological force that is able to suppress the beginning of the next ice age, according to a paper in Nature. 

Scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found the relation of insolation and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to be the key criterion to explain the last eight glacial cycles in Earth history. Even moderate human interference with the planet's natural carbon balance might postpone the next glacial inception by 100,000 years.