An international team has just published a study titled "Greening of the Earth and its Drivers" in the journal Nature Climate Change (doi:10.1038/nclimate3004) showing significant greening of a quarter to one-half of the Earth's vegetated lands using data from the NASA-MODIS and NOAA-AVHRR satellite sensors of the past 33 years.

The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees. Green leaves produce sugars using energy in the sunlight to mix carbon dioxide (CO2) drawn in from the air with water and nutrients pumped in from the ground. These sugars are the source of food, fiber and fuel for life on Earth. More sugars are produced when there is more CO2 in the air, and this is called CO2 fertilization.

The crucibles that bore out early building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, modest puddles.

Now, researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding an evolutionary mystery -- how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed.

In surprisingly simple laboratory reactions in water, under everyday conditions, they have produced what could be good candidates for missing links on the pathway to the code of life.

Researchers wondered whether bed bugs preferred certain colors for their hiding places, so they did some testing in the lab.

The tests consisted of using small tent-like harborages that were made from colored cardstock and placed in Petri dishes. A bed bug was then placed in the middle of the Petri dish and given ten minutes to choose one of the colored harborages. A few variations of the test were also conducted, such as testing bed bugs in different life stages, of different sexes, individual bugs versus groups of bugs, and fed bugs versus hungry bugs.

Seven top international tobacco control experts are prompting regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to have a broad "open-minded" perspective when it comes to regulating vaporized nicotine products, especially e-cigarettes. 

Writing in the journal Addiction, published online April 25, the researchers synthesize much of the evidence published to date on e-cigarettes, and suggest that use of these products can lead to reduced cigarette smoking overall with a potential reduction in deaths from cigarette smoking.

Researchers have used 'network theory' for the first time to visually depict the movement of dinosaurs around the world during the Mesozoic Era - including a curious exodus from Europe.

The research, published today in the Journal of Biogeography, also reaffirms previous studies that have found that dinosaurs continued to migrate to all parts of the world after the 'supercontinent' Pangaea split into land masses that are separated by oceans.

Study lead Dr Alex Dunhill from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, said: "We presume that temporary land bridges formed due to changes in sea levels, temporarily reconnecting the continents."

Our experience of space-time is that of a continuous object, without gaps or discontinuities, just as it is described by classical physics. For some quantum gravity models however, the texture of space-time is "granular" at tiny scales (below the so-called Planck scale, 10-33 cm), as if it were a variable mesh of solids and voids (or a complex foam). One of the great problems of physics today is to understand the passage from a continuous to a discrete description of spacetime: is there an abrupt change or is there gradual transition? Where does the change occur?