A University of Wyoming researcher contributed to a paper that has apparently solved an age-old riddle of how constituent continents were arranged in two Precambrian supercontinents -- then known as Nuna-Columbia and Rodinia. It's a finding that may have future economic implications for mining companies.

Specifically, the article describes a technique Kevin Chamberlain, a UW research professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and other researchers used to test reconstructions of ancient continents. The paper argues that the rocks or crust now exposed in southern Siberia were once connected to northern North America for nearly a quarter of the Earth's history. Those two continental blocks now form the cores of the modern continents of Asia and North America.

A milestone has been reached in the research of zinc loading in crop seeds with large potential benefits to people in the developing world. A team of scientists, led by Professor Michael Broberg Palmgren from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at University of Copenhagen, has just published an article about their findings in Nature Plants, which might well lead the way to growing crops with more zinc accumulated in the seeds.

Michael Broberg Palmgren explains about the breakthrough:

"We have identified the specific system of transport in the plant cells responsible for delivering zinc into the seeds. That knowledge unveils the path to breeding plants with enhanced activity of this particular transport system resulting in more zinc rich seeds."

Cigarette smoking is a noxious mess of 200 toxic chemicals that are risk factors for all kinds of diseases, and so it is sure to be a burden on a health care system that in the United States is increasingly being funded by the government, and therefore the 80 percent of people who do not smoke.

Yet it is also an addiction, and so a small one-year longitudinal study based on surveys which suggests that smokers remain unemployed longer than nonsmokers might seem to be a self-correcting problem. Or it might be that health issues are being used for discrimination, with implicit government approval, the exact opposite of what the federal government says they wanted to accomplish with their health initiatives. 

This news release is available in French.

Astrophysicists at the University of Birmingham have used data from the NASA Kepler space telescope to discover a class of extrasolar planets whose atmospheres have been stripped away by their host stars, according to research published in the journal Nature Communications today (11 April 2016).

According to the study, planets with gaseous atmospheres that lie very close to their host stars are bombarded by a torrent of high-energy radiation. Due to their proximity to the star, the heat that the planets suffer means that their 'envelopes' have been blown away by intense radiation. This violent 'stripping' occurs in planets that are made up of a rocky core with a gaseous outer layer.

A new paper claims the historical involvement of tobacco companies during the early days of the response to the AIDS epidemic was just a cynical marketing ploy to distract the public from the dangers of smoking. 

The big problem with that assertion is not simply that conspiracy theories require all employees to be in sync, but that the dangers of smoking were over 40 years known by the time that large tobacco companies helped mobilize the AIDS response in the 1990s and onwards.