An animation of satellite imagery over the course of two days shows a massive low pressure system that generated severe weather in the southwestern and central U.S. bringing snow, heavy rainfall, flooding and tornadoes. The video, created by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, combined visible and infrared imagery from NOAA's GOES-East satellite.

The 30-second animation shows the movement of the massive storm system from Dec. 26 to early Dec. 28, 2015.

Dublin, Ireland, Dec. 28th, 2015 - A team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast has sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish humans, and the information buried within is already answering pivotal questions about the origins of Ireland's people and their culture.

The team sequenced the genome of an early farmer woman, who lived near Belfast some 5,200 years ago, and those of three men from a later period, around 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, after the introduction of metalworking. Their landmark results are published today in international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.

The specialized human ability to perceive the sound quality known as 'pitch' can no longer be listed as unique to humans. Researchers at Johns Hopkins report new behavioral evidence that marmosets, ancient monkeys, appear to use auditory cues similar to humans to distinguish between low and high notes. The discovery infers that aspects of pitch perception may have evolved more than 40 million years ago to enable vocal communication and songlike vocalizations.

A summary of the research will be published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Dec. 28, 2015.

Millions of trees are in peril from the drought in California but that is not the fault of climate change or even bad luck - every 20 years California has a drought as bad as what just ended. It is instead bad policy; California's water infrastructure has not been improved in a meaningful way since the 1960s and since then environmental policy has been dictated by lobbyists for activist groups, so the state can't build new reservoirs, to store water for when droughts happen, and they are forced to dump fresh water into the Pacific Ocean.

The trees aren't just in peril from politicians and environmentalists, there is also the ever-present wildfires and the destructive bark beetle. 

A recent analysis spanning 40 years of surveys including more than 100 papers on the 'question-behavior effect,' a phenomenon in which asking people about performing a certain behavior influences whether they do it in the future, offers insight to marketers, policy makers and others seeking to impact human behavior.

The authors conclude that asking about performing a future behavior changes the likelihood of that behavior happening. That means parents asking their children, 'Will you drink and drive?' should be more effective than saying, 'Don't drink and drive.' For people making New Year's resolutions, a question like, 'Will I exercise -- yes or no?' may be more effective than declaring, 'I will exercise.'

In a landmark study, researchers from the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital reveal a completely new biological mechanism that underlies cancer. By studying brain tumors that carry mutations in the isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) genes, the team uncovered some unusual changes in the instructions for how the genome folds up on itself. Those changes target key parts of the genome, called insulators, which physically prevent genes in one region from interacting with the control switches and genes that lie in neighboring regions. When these insulators run amok in IDH-mutant tumors, they allow a potent growth factor gene to fall under the control of an always-on gene switch, forming a powerful, cancer-promoting combination.