Newly discovered fossil evidence from Namibia strengthens the proposition that the world's first mass extinction was caused by "ecosystem engineers" - newly evolved biological organisms that altered the environment so radically it drove older species to extinction.

The event, known as the end-Ediacaran extinction, took place 540 million years ago. The earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes - various types of single-celled organisms. These held sway for more than 3 billion years, when the first multicellular organisms evolved. The most successful of these were the Ediacarans, which spread around the globe about 600 million years ago. They were a largely immobile form of marine life shaped like discs and tubes, fronds and quilted mattresses.

There are more than 120,000 varieties of rice stored at the germplasm bank at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, but a new paper focused on varieties that met important criteria - currently grown by farmers, have a high yield potential, be disease and pest-resistant, grow to the right size and have strong enough roots to withstand monsoon-force winds - to find out which ones could were optimal in regards to nitrogen.

Nitrogen is one of three main nutrients required for crops to grow, it also costs the most to produce. 

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Vaccination against a single strain of Zika virus should be sufficient to protect against genetically diverse strains of the virus, according to a study conducted by investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Washington University in St. Louis; and Emory University in Atlanta.

A diet high in saturated fat can make your brain struggle to control what you eat, says a new study in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.

If people are looking to lose weight, stay clear of saturated fat. Consuming these types of fatty food affects a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which helps regulate hunger.

The fat causes inflammation that impedes the brain to control the food intake. In other words, people struggle to control how much they eat, when to stop and what type of food to eat - symptoms seen in obesity.

French men love French women. So much so that given two equal candidates for a job, one male and one female, they are likely to score a female higher when it comes to being a science educator.

Claims of bias are rampant in the United States - women overwhelmingly dominate the social sciences, which men claim is bias, while men dominate the physical sciences, which women say is bias.  Yet once women get into the private sector companies fall all over themselves to hire women, which means the problem may be just in academia. Female doctors are also not penalized for having families - unless they are at academic institutions.

Teenagers with easy access to drugs and alcohol in the home are more likely to drink and do drugs in their early and late 20s, according to an analysis of survey results  from around 15,000 participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health over the course of three waves - when the survey participants were, on average, 16, 22 and 29 years old.

According to Cliff Broman, professor of sociology
at Michigan State University, the effects were more significant among Caucasians and males, which may be odd defiance of stereotype or a confounder, since Hispanic and Asian participants generally had drugs and alcohol more easily available to them in the home during adolescence.