When it comes to wine, 'green' labels just don't pack the same financial wallop that they do for low-energy appliances and organically grown produce. A new study has found that organic labels actually decrease the price consumers are willing to pay for their wine.

Wines made with 'organically' grown grapes rate higher on a widely accepted ranking, said Magali Delmas, a UCLA environmental economist and the study's lead author, and these wines can even command a higher price than their conventionally produced counterparts - as long as wineries don't use the word "organic" on their labels.

When wineries do use eco-labels, prices plummet.

According to a new study of 504 death penalty cases in Harris County, Texas between 1992 and 1999, a defendant is much more likely to be sentenced to death if he or she kills a "high-status" victim - a white or Hispanic victim who is married with a clean criminal record and a college degree. The study appears in a recent issue of Law and Society Review

"The concept of arbitrariness suggests that the relevant legal facts of a capital case cannot fully explain the outcome: irrelevant social facts also shape the ultimate state sanction" says Scott Phillips, associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver (DU). "In the capital of capital punishment, death is more apt to be sought and imposed on behalf of high status victims."

 A new study by researchers at the University of Rochester may very well revolutionize the concept of parenting.

The study of 226 children from kindergarten up to third grade found that those taught skills to monitor and control their anger and other emotions improved their classroom behavior and had significantly fewer school disciplinary referrals and suspensions.

The results have to be replicated by independent researchers, but it appears that children may behave better when they have positive influences in their lives. The study appears in the  Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

An international research team writing in Science says that a section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas.

The results show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

A team of researchers has demonstrated for the first time the specific activity of the protein NEIL3, one of a group responsible for maintaining the integrity of DNA in humans and other mammals. The discovery is detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since it first was identified about eight years ago, NEIL3 has been believed to be a basic DNA-maintenance enzyme of a type called a glycosylase. These proteins patrol the long, twisted strands of DNA looking for lesions—places where one of the four DNA bases has been damaged by radiation or chemical activity.

Sea ice may have extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time, geologists report this week in Science.

The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada -- bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.

The survival of eukaryotic life throughout this period indicates sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.