Clouds, which can absorb or reflect incoming radiation and affect the amount of radiation escaping from Earth's atmosphere, remain the greatest source of uncertainty in global climate modeling.

ine making (and drinking) has long been more art than science, a subjective experience. But that is changing. In the future, you will be able to find a type of wine you like and have it consistently - all determined by science.

Unlocking the chemical processes that create a wine's aroma is the objective of scientists who recently sequenced the genome of the high-value Tannat grape, from which "the most healthy of red wines" are fermented. 

Tannat is the "national grape" of Uruguay, South America's 4th-largest wine producer with 21,000 acres of vineyards. More than a third of the grapes grown are Tannat, from which the country's signature wines are produced. 

Technology may not seem like more of a woman's world than science, but in some ways it is - Ada Lovelace is revered by computer programmers and is well-known in popular culture, while Laura Bassi, the first women to forge a professional scientific career, is basically unknown outside physics.

Laura Bassi was born in Bologna in 1711 and rose to celebrity status across the globe, gaining a reputation as being the best physics teacher of her generation and helping to develop the discipline of experimental physics.She was the "woman who understood Newton", even more of a fascination then because so few men in science understood Newton.

The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) on the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is going to show that two-way laser communication beyond Earth is possible, broadening the possibility of transmitting huge amounts of data.

In the future, this could allow for 3-D High Definition video transmissions from deep space missions back to Earth.

Humanities scholars writing in a new paper contend that brushes with the law are often related to 'finances' and therefore if criminals got better financial training when they're released from prison, and get private tutors rather than classroom instruction, their financial stress would be lower.

For the paper, 155 incarcerated men in two Midwestern jails completed a lengthy survey to assess their financial knowledge and behavior; 12 men agreed to in-depth interviews.

Angela Wiley, a University of Illinois professor of applied family studies and co-author of the article, said that four content areas emerged as being most important: investing, self-employment, budgeting, and saving.

Natural rivers are not straight and they are rarely idle; instead, they bend and curve and sometimes appear to wriggle across the surface over time.

That rivers can meander is obvious but how and why they do so is less well known. These questions are complicated by the fact that researchers have for the most part been unable to realistically create a meandering river in a laboratory.

Scientists have previously created simulated streams that bend and branch, but they were not able to limit the river to only a single main flow path or maintain such dynamic motion past the initial bend formation. Working with a 20-by-36 foot river simulator called the Eurotank, van Dijk et al. created a dynamically meandering river.