The largest climate change in central North America since the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, a temperature drop of nearly 15 degrees Fahrenheit, is documented within the fossilized teeth of horses and other plant-eating mammals, a new study reveals.

The overwhelming majority of previous climate-change studies on the 400,000-year transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene epochs, about 33.5 million years ago, focus on marine environments, but University of Florida vertebrate paleontologist Bruce MacFadden and his colleagues turned their attention to fossils from the Great Plains.

New research findings may help refine the accepted models used by earth scientists over the past 30 years to describe the ways in which continents clash to form the Earth's landscape.

Eric Calais, an associate professor of geophysics at Purdue University, in collaboration with Ming Wang and Zenghang Shen from the Institute for Geology and Earthquake Science in China, used global positioning systems to record the precise movements of hundreds of points on the continent of Asia over a 10-year period.

A new analysis led by an MIT scientist describes a mechanism for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from a power plant and injecting the gas into the ground, where it would be trapped naturally as tiny bubbles and safely stored in briny porous rock.

This means that it may be possible for a power plant to be built in an appropriate location and have all its carbon dioxide emissions captured and injected underground throughout the life of the power plant, and then safely stored over centuries and even millennia.

Pity the molecular biologist.

The object of fascination for most is the DNA molecule. But in solution, DNA, the genetic material that hold the detailed instructions for virtually all life, is a twisted knot, looking more like a battered ball of yarn than the famous double helix.

At last, neuroscience is having an impact on computer science and artificial intelligence (AI). For the first time, scientists in Tomaso Poggio’s laboratory at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT applied a computational model of how the brain processes visual information to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this new approach.

“People have been talking about computers imitating the brain for a long time,” said Poggio, who is also the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the co-director of the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT. “That was Alan Turing’s original motivation in the 1940s.

A first-of-its-kind study published in the February issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics suggests endoscopic brain surgery, pioneered by surgeons at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, has the potential to be safer and often more effective than conventional surgery in children with life-threatening conditions.

This minimally invasive approach -- known as the Expanded Endonasal Approach (EEA) -- was pioneered and refined in adults over the last decade by surgeons at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and is now a viable option for tumors in children and in many instances for tumors that were once deemed to be inoperable.

Collaborating with colleagues at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, surgeons have recently expanded its use to in