Carbon dioxide, in its ionic form bicarbonate, has a regulating function in the splitting of water in photosynthesis. This means that carbon dioxide has an additional role to being reduced to sugar, according to scientists at Umeå University in Sweden.

Tobacco is a high-density crop that is mowed several times throughout its cycle and that can be a good thing, because it can produce as much as 160 tons of fresh biomass per hectare.

Biomass that is suitable for producing bioethanol.  Smoking cigarettes is bad but renewable energy is good, tobacco just needs some help from science.

Singlet oxygen is an electronically excited state of oxygen that is less stable than normal oxygen. Its high reactivity has enabled its use in photodynamic therapy, in which light is used in combination with a photosensitizing drug to generate large amounts of singlet oxygen to kill cancer cells or various pathogens. 

Global warming may be a topic of debate and arguments about measurements and models, but some things are measurable right now, like environmental pollutants. 

Although persistent environmental pollutants are released worldwide, the Arctic and Antarctic regions are significantly more contaminated with persistent organic pollutants than elsewhere; marine animals living there have some of the highest levels of persistent organic pollutant (POP) contamination of any creatures and the Inuit people of the Arctic, who rely on a diet of fish, seals and whales, have also been shown to have higher POP concentrations than people living in our latitudes.

A new paper suggests that genes evolve more rapidly in species containing germ plasm, which
challenges a long held belief about the way certain species of vertebrates evolved. 

The results came about as the researchers put to the test a novel theory that early developmental events dramatically alter the vertebrate body plan and the way evolution proceeds. 

Dog owners in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia might want to consider penning up their dogs more often: hybridization of wolves with shepherd dogs might be more common, and more recent, than previously thought, according to a recently published study in the Journal of Heredity (DOI: 10.1093/jhered/esu014).