Greenhouse emissions and the constant burning of fuels are not about to leave the planet unharmed, so people need to be prepared to face even hotter temperatures from now on.

This is hardly good news, given the extended periods of drought  that have already affected crops. The future doesn’t look very bright for the animals, insects, plants  and the people inhabiting the planet. We are all going to be affected by the scarcity of the resources, by the intolerable heat and the polluted air unless solutions are found as soon as possible.

Researchers predict that 2015 and 2016 are going to be the hottest years we have ever witnessed so far, mainly due to the occurrence of a new El Nino that will speed up the global warming process. This phenomenon, which also occurred a few years ago, will increase temperatures and rainfall, especially in the Pacific area.

According to scientists, El Nino has already begun, and it is likely to last until at least next year. Up until now, it seems that temperatures were increasing at a 50 percent slower pace than they did before 1998.

However, the long pause perceived in temperature rise between 1998 and 2012 has come to an end. The first months of 2015 have been incredibly hot compared to the previous years, according to the United Nations World Meteorological Organization.

The report published in the British Met Office looks at the climate patterns over the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans and it seems that the signs are all pointing towards higher temperatures over the next couple of years.

One of the authors of the report, Adam Scaife, said that human activity has contributed to climate change a great deal, through massive greenhouse gas emissions that have affected the amount of heat that the  Earth’s atmosphere retains. On the other hand, there are many other natural factors that have influenced the temperatures. An example is the devastating El Nino, a phenomenon that shows up unexpectedly.

In November 2015, about 200 nations are scheduled to meet in Paris to discuss the issue of global warming and come up with solutions to slow it down.

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As researchers discover why sweetgrass is an efficient insect repellent, they also reveal the importance of studying the popular remedies that people have been using for many years years now.

Identifying the scientific explanation for the success of these remedies might actually herald the discovery of newer and more potent substances that could be valuable alternatives in the treatment of numerous diseases.

Sweetgrass has been used as an insect repellent by the native Americans for a great many years. Since it is considered to be extremely effective in keeping mosquitoes away, a team of researchers wanted to understand what exactly makes the plant so useful in fighting off the small pests, as the world is in dire need of less toxic but more potent substances for managing the mosquito population, because the mosquito is a vector for some of the world’s worst diseases.

The study was led by Dr. Charles Cantrell of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Together with his team of researchers, he took the sweetgrass and extracted essential oil from it, as well as several other active compounds.

Then, they conducted an experiment that was meant to test out the potency of the sweetgrass oil, as compared to N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide, commonly known as DEET, which is an efficient commercial repellent on the market.

The team used a specialized feeding solution that they died red in order to lure the mosquitoes in. The vials of feeding solution were topped off with a membrane, mean to simulate human skin, that the repellents were added to, just as an insect repellent would be used in practice. They tested out the DEET and the selection of sweetgrass-based compounds they had extracted. They measured the potency of the repellents in accordance to the number of mosquito bites that each vial got.

Their findings revealed that the essential oil they had extracted from sweetgrass was the most potent compound in it and that it was about as efficient as the DEET.

Then, they realized they had to go deeper and see what exactly was making the sweetgrass so efficient. And so, they used state of the art spectrometry and spectroscopy techniques to study the sweetgrass oil and they succeeded in separating it into a total of 12 fractions.

This is how they revealed that the two substances that give sweetgrass its repellent properties are actually coumarin and phytol. These are not new to the scientific community, but the full extent of their insect repellent properties was apparently not known.

Dr. Cantrell has pointed out that further research is required in order to test out the efficacy of the sweetgrass oil in a much more detailed manner before it could be considered appropriate for being included in insect repellent formulas.

It remains to be seen what this research will reveal, but sweetgrass oil might be a less toxic version of an insect repellent that people could use to keep safe from mosquitoes.
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The Drinkable Book is one of the most promising inventions of the decade, as it has a massive potential to improve the lives of people from underprivileged regions and developing countries, where clean water remains a luxury.

The book includes the most valuable information on how to get clean water printed on its pages, but every single page of the book is a filter, that can be used to actually make the water cleaner and safe to drink.

Its great potential is generated precisely by the fact that it is extremely easy to use. The people only need to tear out a page of the book and insert it into an extremely easy to use filter and it is ready to work. They can then pour the water over the filer and 99% of the bacteria in the water will be killed in the process.

This is an enormous advancement, considering that the vast majority of drinking water in developing countries comes from ponds, lakes and rivers. This is also why the filter holders are tailor made for buckets, as these are the most widely utilized means of transporting water.

The pages of the Drinkable Book are impregnated with silver and copper and as the water passes through the special filter, the bacteria are met with silver and copper ions which kill them in the process.

Another immense advantage is that the filters do not leave toxic residue in the water, as the levels of silver and copper remain below legal limits. Furthermore, one book would last for many years in a household from the developing world, considering that one single filter can clean as much as 100 liters of contaminated water.

Dr. Theresa Dankovich, the main developer of the Drinkable Book, hopes that her invention will become mass produced one day, so that more and more people could have easy access to a healthier tomorrow through the use of clean water.

Further testing still needs to be conducted on Dr. Dankovich’s book, so as to assess its efficacy on more than bacteria. Researchers seem to be particularly curious about whether or not it might be able to kill viruses and various protozoa that might be lurking in the water.

The Drinkable Book stands to improve the life of millions of people from developing countries significantly, because such an accessible and inexpensive cleaning method for water supplies could enable people to lead much healthier lives.
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Researchers have discovered that frogs do not use their poison only to protect themselves form enemies, but that there are also venomous species that in addition can be more dangerous than pit vipers. Scientists have discovered the first species of venomous frogs in Brazil. The paper was published in the journal Current Biology.

The discovery was made by accident by a researcher from the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Carlos Jared, who injured his hand on some bony spikes that were on the head of a frog species called Corythomantis greeningi. The species is found in the savannas of eastern Brazil. Unlike poisonous frogs that have no fangs to deliver toxins, venomous frogs actively release toxins.

Edmund Brodie Jr. from Utah State University in Logan said that animals that are venomous are in most cases discovered through accidents.  Brodie himself related of how early in his career he discovered details of the venom released by the fire salamander while he was tickling the animals with a piece of grass in order to show to his students how the toxin is discharged. The salamander sprayed the toxin right in this eyes and Brodie explained that he was immediately blinded and the pain he felt was extraordinary.  He ran water in his eyes but even after 20 minutes it did not help much because the poison was not soluble in water.

In the case of Corythomantis greeningi Jared felt intense pain in his arm which lasted for five hours. Only when he analyzed the frog’s upper lips with the microscope did he understand that head-butting discharges venom. Jared explained that the bone spikes that erupted near the venom glands were huge. When the frog curls its lip back the glands dribble toxins onto the spikes that stick out of the skull.

Researchers also observed that one gram from Corythomantis greeningicould’s venom could kill six humans and 24.000 mice. Compared with it, the venom of the Brazilian Bothrops pit viper is half as deadly.

The team has discovered a second species of venomous frog as well; Aparasphenodon brunoi. This species is 25 times more dangerous than the venom of the pit vipers. It can kill 80 humans and 300.000 mice.

The scientists are now concentrated on investigating other species of frogs from around the world which they suspect they could also be venomous frogs.

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According to a recent study, texting and walking, one of the most irritating habits that pedestrians exhibit is extremely annoying, but virtually harmless, because it seems that people go into a walking safe mode, while paying attention to something so elaborate as texting.

The lead author of the study, Conrad Earnest of the Texas A&M University, explains how this safe mode that people go into is manifested by walking slower and in smaller steps, so as to keep away from obstacles. He realized that texting and walking is a very popular trend among people nowadays that hasn’t actually been properly studied and yet, most people are absolutely convinced that it leads to frequent trips and falls.

Considering that people associate texting and walking with texting and driving and that people look absolutely disoriented when they’re focusing on their phones, rather than the sidewalk and the people and various obstacles on it, it makes sense that the habit be viewed as being extremely dangerous. Also, the countless horror stories that have been so popular in the media in the last few years, featuring people who have fallen in fountains and open manholes and who have been hit by cars, have built a solid negative reputation for the habit.

Earnest himself got the idea for the study by observing people on the street while texting and walking. He realized that they were not exactly the accident waiting to happen that people think them to be and so he became convinced that a small study would get to the bottom of things.

And so, he gathered 30 subjects for his study and chose them so that they can make up homogenous group. There were both males and females included in the study and they were aged 18-50, in order to provide diversity. The subjects were asked to walk along a specialized Z-shaped path, that included a wide variety of obstacles, ranging from bumps in the road to uneven stairs and even dummies that were supposed to represent the other pedestrians on the streets.

The subjects were asked to walk along the path in three separate instances; walking normally, walking while answering a series of designated questions sent as text messages and walking while answering a math quiz on a smartphone, that was meant to simulate an activity that would be more complicated than texting. The order in which the subjects performed these three tasks was completely randomized.

After closely analyzing the results of the experiment, Conrad Earnest and his team realized that in fact texting and walking is actually not the accident prone habit it is considered. The subjects displayed a slower walking pattern while texting and they seemed to be considerably more cautious. The main result was that they did not fall or hit any of the obstacles. They did however display a tendency to veer to one side or the other, rather than walking in a straight line.

This is actually one of the issues that have been raised in regards to Earnest’s study, because the subjects were aware that they were being analyzed as part of a texting and walking study and this might have caused them to be particularly cautious in their walking and in their ability to keep a relatively straight path.

“We didn’t see a huge increase in barrier contacts,(…) we did see (…) that people slowed down and seemed to exhibit more cautious behavior when walking and texting, but that still didn’t eliminate their veering side-to-side.” concluded Earnest.

While this study offers only limited information on the curious habit of texting and walking, it does shed some light into its development pattern.  Ultimately, it remains up to the pedestrian to determine whether or not the path he has to take is suitable for texting and walking or not. There are however certain points where people need to part with their phones for a few minutes, such as crossings, that could prove to be very dangerous otherwise, in spite of the safe mode adopted by the walkers.
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The blue moon is finally here. This phenomenon which happens every three years will occur on July 31. This term is used for an extra moon meaning that instead of the usual 12 moons a year will have 13. The last blue moon was in 2012 when certain time zones enjoyed two full moons in August and September.

In spite of the name we won’t actually see a blue moon on the sky. The natural color of the moon is a combination of grey and white as NASA pictures present it. If the moon has a different color it is due to events which occur on the surface of the Earth and not in space. An actual blue moon can be seen only when certain air compounds such as ash and pollutants enter in the atmosphere of our planet. Such a moon could be observed in exotic regions where there are volcanic areas.

For example when Krakatoa, the Indonesian volcano, erupted in 1883 the plumes of ash which ascended to the top of the atmosphere made the moon blue and even green sometimes.   Scott Rowland, a volcanologist from the University of Hawaii said that even the sun seemed to have a lavender hue. He also remarked:

Such vivid red sunsets that fire engines were called out in New York, Poughkeepsie, and New Haven to quench the apparent conflagration.”

An average lunar cycle or one lunation has 29.53 days and a tropical year has nearly 365.24 days. As a result in a tropical year there are 12.37 lunations. According to the Gregorian calendar there is one full moon in each month of a year containing 12 months. However each calendar year has approximately eleven days more than the days which normally exist in twelve lunar cycles. As the extra days pile up every three years we have an extra full moon.

The Gregorian calendar is the most common time measurement used in the world. Since the moon orbits our planet less than our common calendar month indicates the day adds up outside the calendar. However time is measured by the force of the sky and the universe’s way of telling us about the remaining days outside the calendar is the blue moon which appears twice in a month.

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A team of researchers from the United States and Australia has managed to find out that the woolly mammoth was not actually killed by human hunter, but by sudden climate changes.  Researchers say that this study confirms the idea that the severity of climate change is not as important as the speed and this can highly impact our climate which is influenced by global warming.

The scientists found that during the last ice age, also known as Pleistocene, which lasted from 60.000 to 12.000 ago, the major extinction of woolly mammoths coincided with interstadials, which were rapid warming events that lasted for a short period of time.

Alan Cooper, the director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA and the lead author of the study, explained that this abrupt warming highly influenced the climate which consequently changed vegetation patterns and global rainfall. He also added:

“Even without the presence of humans we saw mass extinctions. When you add the modern addition of human pressures and fragmenting of the environment to the rapid changes brought by global warming, it raises serious concerns about the future of our environment.”

The co-author of the study Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales said that it should also be considered that man played an important role in the mass extinction.

Besides offering insight into how to woolly mammoth ceased to exist with the help of new data and new statistical methods the study also created an incredibly accurate record of species movement and climate change during Pleistocene. The paper published in the journal Science is the first one which connected a certain climate event with the localized extinction of megafauna.

For the research the scientists compared data about ancient megafaunal DNA with radiocarbon offering detailed geological information about severe climate events from ancient sediments and ice cores.

Professor Chris Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institutions Department of Global Ecology. He was not involved in the study, but he appreciated how detailed the study was. He confessed that he was impressed with the findings.

Field also added that ancient humans did not play a major part in the interstadial warming, but at present modern humans are recreating that type of rapid climate change.

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A recent study has pointed out that drinking coffee may reduce a person’s risk for developing diabetes and also reduce overall inflammation rates.

The study was conducted by the Harokopio University from Athens, Greece and led by Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos, Nutrition and Dietetics Department representative. They utilized an interesting approach on the matter, as they have randomly selected approximately 1,300 subjects, so they would have a homogenous group and went to study their coffee drinking patterns, rather than selecting them strictly based on this factor.

They did assign definitions to the three main patterns that they have met. Thus, those who did not drink any coffee were considered “non-coffee drinkers”, those who only haad under one and a half cups a day were deemed “casual drinkers” and those who exceeded this daily quota were considered “habitual drinkers”.

Their 1,300 subjects were divided into the three categories and so, they had 239 non-coffee drinkers 816 casual drinkers and 385 habitual drinkers, according to the results of a massive survey that included questions about their diets and their coffee drinking patterns. Blood samples were also drawn from the subjects, in order to assess overall inflammation levels and antioxidant levels .

In the second phase of the study, that was performed 10 years after the initial phase, the patients were reassessed and it became apparent that 191 of them had developed diabetes along that time. Upon analyzing diabetes occurrence in accordance to coffee consumption rates, the study revealed that the habitual coffee drinker were as much as 54% less likely to develop diabetes than the non-coffee drinkers. The study has also revealed that inflammation rates were significantly lower among coffee drinkers.

“An inverse relation between coffee intake and diabetes has been reported in many prospective studies whereas some have yielded insignificant results,” said Demosthenes B. Panagiotakos in an e-mail for Reuters Health.

There is additional research being performed at the moment on this particular matter, as it remains uncertain whether or not coffee can truly prevent diabetes at a significant level. Scientists point out that the best possible preventative measure for diabetes remains having a healthy life style, that needs to include a balanced diet and also regular physical exercise.
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If there was any doubt that polar bears are an endangered species and they might disappear within the next few decades,  new research brings fresh proof that this is indeed true.

In spite of previous studies that showed these large beautiful mammals can go on without food for long periods of time because they conserve their energy through “walking hibernation”, which decreases their physical activity, the new study concludes that this phenomenon does not really exist.

This basically means that polar bears are starving to death in the warmer season. As the temperatures increase due to climate change, the ice caps are constantly melting, which makes it more difficult for bears to hunt seals for food.

The most prolific period for them to hunt was from April to July, but this has changed considerably once the weather got warmer. Their inability to store energy makes it even harder for them to survive.

“We found that polar bears appear unable to meaningfully prolong their reliance on stored energy, confirming their vulnerability to lost hunting opportunities on the sea ice — even as they surprised us by also exhibiting an unusual ability to minimize heat loss while swimming in Arctic waters,” said lead author of the study John Whiteman, who is  a doctoral student at the University of Wyoming.

The team of researchers took into account more than 24 bears, in which they implanted temperature loggers. They monitored these animals from 2008 to 2010 in the Beaufort Sea.

The scientists came to the conclusion that their body significantly deteriorated when they had nothing to eat, which means that the polar bears are not able to conserve their energy.

The most worrying aspect is that this will probably lead to most bears’ death once they are unable to hunt at all because of increased temperatures that give seals the opportunity to hide from them better.

Hunting takes a lot of their energy as well and, if it is not successful, it is very likely that exhaustion will contribute to the physical degradation of their bodies.

Due to the very small number of polar bears living worldwide, they have been placed on the list of threatened species since 2008.

The results of the study were published in the journal Science on the 16^th of July.

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Nothing is more annoying than the sound of a mosquito buzzing around our heads on a summer night while we desperately try to sleep despite the heat and the insomnia. However we try to fight them they always come back to bite us and feed on our blood. According to a new study, mosquitoes are very-well equipped to track us down and suck our blood. The researchers found that the tiny insects can sense the heat of our body and the CO2 in our breath from meters away.

Scientists have been trying for a long time to find out how mosquitoes choose their victims and what attracts them to us in the first place. The new study reveals that mosquitoes have a very sensitive sense of smell.

The researchers studied a batch of mosquitoes to see how they react in different circumstances. The buzzing insects were enclosed inside a tunnel where the scientists were able to control them. Twenty mosquitoes were released into the special room that had a single black dot on one of its walls. The experts wanted to determine how developed the insects’ senses of smell and sight were.

According to the study, the mosquitoes did not seem to notice the black spot until the scientists released some CO2 inside the room. By releasing the carbon dioxide, the researchers wanted to mimic the human or animal breath. After the CO2 was released, the mosquitoes started to buzz their way to the single black spot and sat on top of it. Suddenly, the black spot was of interest to the little blood suckers, the researchers observed.

Jeff Riffell, biologist at the University of Washington, and one of the researchers who conducted the study, explained that the tunnel could control the wind conditions and the mosquitoes that lived inside it. This way the scientists were able to find out more about their blood-sucking behavior. Riffell wrote in his paper that animals that have warm blood, humans included, release carbon dioxide while exhaling and the mosquitoes can sense that even if they are standing 30 ft from the victim.

Riffell explained that mosquitoes appeared to be using their sense of sight and smell before deciding who they will be biting next, a deer, a dog or a human. Flores van Breugel, another scientist who contributed to the study, said that previous experiments involving fruit flies showed that they were more attracted to pleasant odors, which made the insects more alert.
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