(National Snow and Ice Data Center)
“Air temperature anomalies were up to more than 20 degrees Celsius [36 Fahrenheit] above the mean,” noted Tedesco. A lack of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean north of Scandinavia gave this bubble of warmth a bit of an extra boost, intensifying its warm conveyor belt into Greenland. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the rate of melting this early in the year has been off the charts.

(San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office)
With the illness marching through his body and his time running low, Arthur Rudy Martinez turned himself in. With DNA breakthroughs in mind, investigators with the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office in 2005 submitted DNA collected from the 1977 and 1978 crime scenes for analysis. Investigators eventually determined the inmate with a familial match had a relative living in San Luis Obispo County at the time of the murders: Martinez.

The scientist will compare the groups using a statistical analysis that results in a P value, a result between 0 and 1, with the “P” standing for probability. The 0.05 cutoff has become shorthand for scientific quality, says Blake McShane, one of the authors on the Nature commentary and a statistician at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “First you show me your P less than 0.05, and then I will go and think about the data quality and study design,” he says. Because statistical significance is entrenched in science culture, being used widely in decisions on whether to fund, promote or publish scientific research, a switch to anything else would take huge effort, says Steven Goodman, a Stanford University medical research methodologist who contributed one of the 43 articles of the special issue of the American Statistician.

Since large earthquakes are rare, cataloging the tiniest of quakes provides the researchers with a vast untapped dataset that will now allow them to dig deeper and better study the patterns and relationships between events. For areas like the U.S. Midwest, van der Lee says, template matching is also a challenge since earthquake monitoring is scarce and quakes are relatively infrequent. Without past quake templates, many true earthquake signals are left out of the data.

In a study that raises profound questions about the line between life and death, researchers have restored some cellular activity to brains removed from slaughtered pigs. But in an experimental treatment, blood vessels in the pigs’ brains began functioning, flowing with a blood substitute, and certain brain cells regained metabolic activity, even responding to drugs. When the researchers tested slices of treated brain tissue, they discovered electrical activity in some neurons.

Concerned that the predatory owl might eat the wood duck chick, Wolf contacted a raptor expert, who confirmed the duckling might be in danger. In that case, the female owl was actually able to incubate and hatch three wood duck chicks, says Artuso, who published the findings in 2007 in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. After all, wood duck eggs are not only more oblong in shape than owl eggs, they’re also about twice the volume.

Later this month, a committee of researchers from around the world will decide whether the Earth sprang into the Anthropocene, a new chapter of its history, in the year 1950. If accepted, this delineation will signal a new reality that human activities, not natural processes, are now the dominant driver of change on Earth’s surface—that carbon pollution, climate change, deforestation, factory farms, mass die-offs, and enormous road networks have made a greater imprint on the planet than any other force in the past 12,000 years. First, should the Anthropocene be added as a new epoch to the Geological Time Scale, the standard scientific timeline of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history?

Pieces of a diamond anvil cell.Photo: Ryan F. Mandelbaum (Gizmodo)
Superconductors haven’t seen widespread commercial applications due to their cost, the effort required to produce them, and perhaps reluctance by old-school companies to adopt such a radically new material, reports IEEE Spectrum. Physicist Neil Ashcroft realized in 1970 that this metallic hydrogen might be a high-temperature superconductor and, later, that materials containing mostly hydrogen plus another element mixed in, called hydrides, might also be high-temperature superconductors. Then in 2014, a team led by Russian physicist Mikhail Eremets would blow the field open by demonstrating superconductivity at temperatures a few hundred degrees above absolute zero by compressing hydrogen sulfide gas.

From a social behavior standpoint, as Sanjuán and his colleagues pointed out in their paper, the wild-type VSV’s suppression of interferon qualifies as an altruistic act because in effect the wild type sacrifices itself for the cheater. Because both the virus and the host’s interferon response spread out from cell to cell, it’s actually quite difficult to avoid the emergence of spatial structures during infection. Another aspect of social evolution of viruses that Sanjuán is investigating is why multiple viral particles sometimes gather and infect a cell together.

Emerging studies show that air pollution is linked to impaired judgement, mental health problems, poorer performance in school and most worryingly perhaps, higher levels of crime. Watch our animated version on BBC Reel: How dirty air is polluting our minds

It was in 2011 that Sefi Roth, a researcher at the London School of Economics was pondering the many effects of air pollution. Lead researcher Joanne Newbury, from King’s College London, says she cannot yet claim that her results are causal, but the findings are in line with other studies suggesting a link between air pollution and mental health.