Sci/Tech

Feb. 27, 2017 – Chronic pain sufferers and those taking mental health meds would rather turn to cannabis instead of their prescribed opioid medication, according to new research by the University of British Columbia and University of Victoria. “This study is one of the first to track medical cannabis use under the new system of […]

Feb. 23, 2017 – British Antarctic Survey (BAS) recently captured this video footage of a huge crack in the Larsen C Ice Shelf, on the Antarctic Peninsula. Currently a huge iceberg, roughly the size of Norfolk, looks set to break off Larsen C Ice Shelf, which is more than twice the size of Wales. Satellite observations […]

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21, 2017 – The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has made significant accomplishments to advance the science of global environmental change and improve the understanding of its impact on society through activities such as developing Earth-observing systems, improving Earth-system modeling capabilities, and advancing understanding of carbon-cycle processes, says a new report from […]

PORTLAND, Ore., February 21, 2017—The monarch, one of the best known and most beloved butterflies in North America, faces an uncertain future. Loss of milkweed is the most significant factor contributing to declines in the eastern United States, yet little is known about the reasons for decline west of the Rockies. To help fill this […]

Irvine, Calif., Feb. 21, 2017 – Global climate change is being felt in many coastal communities of the United States, not always in the form of big weather disasters but as a steady drip, drip, drip of nuisance flooding. According to researchers at the University of California, Irvine, rising sea levels will cause these smaller […]

Feb. 20, 2017 – Some of the most important crops risk substantial damage from rising temperatures. To better assess how climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions will likely impact wheat, maize and soybean, an international team of scientists now ran an unprecedentedly comprehensive set of computer simulations of US crop yields. The simulations […]

Feb. 14, 2017 – People who eat a gluten-free diet may be at risk for increased exposure to arsenic and mercury – toxic metals that can lead to cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurological effects, according to a report in the journal Epidemiology. Gluten-free diets have become popular in the U.S., although less than 1 percent […]

HOUSTON, TX, Feb. 9, 2017 – Breast cancer patients with dense breast tissue have almost a two-fold increased risk of developing disease in the contralateral breast, according to new research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer. The study, published in the journal Cancer, is among the first to find the association between breast […]

February 9, 2017 – Less than a year after the first research flight kicked off NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland campaign last March, data from the new program are providing a dramatic increase in knowledge of how Greenland’s ice sheet is melting from below. Two new research papers in the journal Oceanography use OMG observations to […]

February 9, 2017 – The Louisiana coastline is sinking under the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of about one football field of land every hour (about 18 square miles of land lost in a year). But within this sinking region, two river deltas are growing. The Atchafalaya River and its diversion channel, Wax Lake […]

New York February 6, 2017 – An international team of scientists has confirmed that the dorado catfish  (Brachyplatystoma rousseauxii) of the Amazon River basin holds the record for the world’s longest exclusively freshwater fish migration, an epic life-cycle journey stretching nearly the entire width of the South America continent. The finding, published today in the journal […]