A carbon tax of just $11 would offset the CO2 emissions from tourism, according to a paper in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Every time people go on vacation, or journalists go off to climate conferences like the one in Paris, they are using fossil fuel energy. The total emissions from vacations like that would be the sixth largest emitter of CO2 if it were a country - five percent of total human-made emissions of CO2.   

Biologists have induced one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm without altering the genomic sequence. The work reveals physiological circuits as a new kind of epigenetics - information existing outside of genomic sequence - that determines large-scale anatomy.  

The most direct information about the interior of the earth comes from measuring how seismic acoustic waves--such as those created by earthquakes -- travel through the earth. Those measurements show that 95% of the earth's core is liquid. But, scientists also want to know the composition of the liquid, and that is harder. Now, in research published in Nature Communications, scientists from the Materials Dynamics Laboratory at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, along with collaborators from the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Earth-Life Science Institute and other institutes, have succeeded in measuring the speed of sound in mixtures of liquid iron and carbon in extreme conditions, allowing limits to be set on the core composition.

Scientists drilling into the ocean floor have for the first time found out what happens when one tectonic plate first gets pushed under another.

The international expedition drilled into the Pacific ocean floor and found distinctive rocks formed when the Pacific tectonic plate changed direction and began to plunge under the Philippine Sea Plate about 50 million years ago.

"It's a bit like a rugby scrum, with two rows of forwards pushing on each other. Then one side goes down and the other side goes over the top," said study leader Professor Richard Arculus, from The Australian National University (ANU).

Researchers have attempted to measure all the material leaving and entering a mountain range over millions of years and discovered that glacial erosion can, under the right circumstances, wear down mountains faster than plate tectonics can build them.

A study of the St. Elias Mountains on the Alaskan coast by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, University of Florida, Oregon State University and elsewhere found that erosion accelerated sharply about one million years ago.

Scientists have revealed that glucocorticoids, a class of steroid hormones that are commonly prescribed as drugs, enhance muscle endurance and alleviate muscular dystrophy through activation of the gene KLF15. Critically, this pathway is not involved in muscle wasting or the other major detrimental effects of prolonged steroid use.

The discovery could lead to the development of new medications that improve muscle function without the negative consequences caused by long-term steroid exposure, especially important for progressive muscle wasting diseases like Duchenne's muscular dystrophy (DMD).