The natural climate archives recorded in a stalagmite from a limestone cave in southern Arizona link the Southwest's winter precipitation to temperatures in the North Atlantic, according to new research in Nature Geoscience. The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S.

The stalagmite yielded an almost continuous, century-by-century climate record spanning 55,000 to 11,000 years ago. During that time ice sheets covered much of North America, and the Southwest was cooler and wetter than it is now.

As people age, they gradually lose their ability to filter out irrelevant information. But that may actually give aging adults a memory advantage over their younger counterparts, according to a new study appearing in Psychological Science.

The study demonstrated that when older adults "hyper-encode" extraneous information – and they typically do this without even knowing they're doing it – they have the unique ability to "hyper-bind" the information; essentially tie it to other information that is appearing at the same time.

Some animal-pollinated plants face an interesting dilemma. The same animals they rely on for pollination also like to eat them. This is the case for Nicotiana attenuata, a wild tobacco plant that grows in the American Southwest. The plant is pollinated by the night-active hawkmoth, which after the quib pro quo exchange of pollination for nectar likes to lay its eggs on N. attenuata—eggs that develop into voracious, leaf-eating caterpillars.

Young people are all for saving the environment--as long as doing so makes economic sense, according to new research conducted at Michigan State University.

Based on a survey of 18- to 30-year-olds, researchers from MSU's Eli Broad Graduate School of Management found that young consumers will not pay a premium price for an automobile simply because it is environmentally friendly. Instead, the determining factor – by far – is fuel efficiency.

The findings reveal an eco-savvy generation that has grown up and is coming to grips with the economic reality of paying bills.

Viruses are thought to spread by entering a cell, replicating, and then moving on to infect new cells. But a new study published in Science reveals that some viruses spread much faster than previously thought, and it may be possible to stop the spread of disease by slowing them down.

Using live video microscopy, the scientists discovered that the vaccinia virus was spreading four times more quickly than thought possible, based on the rate at which it replicates. Videos of virus-infected cells revealed that the virus spreads by surfing from cell to cell, using a mechanism that allows it to bounce past cells that are already infected and reach uninfected cells as quickly as possible.

Biologists know that Chaperonins ensure proteins are folded properly to carry out their assigned roles in cells, and according to a new letter published in Nature, they may also know how these molecular chaperones function.

In the new study of archaea (single-celled organisms without nuclei to enclose their genetic information), researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and Stanford University in California discovered how the Group II chaperonins close and open folding chambers to initate the folding event and to release the functional protein to the cell.