Scientists Warn of Significant Harm From Ocean Acidification

The oceans of the Pale Blue Dot are going to be a lot less hospitable to coral reefs and other marine life by the end of the century. That’s one of the worrying conclusions from a new expert report that summarizes problems from increasing acidity
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Humans’ music and genes may have evolved together

Music may be a tool scientists can use to trace human migrations. Researchers analyzed traditional folk songs and the mitochondrial DNA among nine indigenous populations of Taiwan and found an association between the diversity of the groups’ music and the variation in the groups’ genetic material.
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Fire may smolder under Antarctic ice

Quivers in the remote West Antarctic have all the hallmarks of volcanoes and magma under the ice, according to a study appearing November 17 in Nature Geoscience

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Thin, active invisibility cloak demonstrated for first time

Invisibility cloaking is no longer the stuff of science fiction: two researchers in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering have demonstrated an effective invisibility cloak that is thin, scalable and adaptive to different types and sizes of objects.
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New paradigm for solar cell construction demonstrated

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University have experimentally demonstrated a new paradigm for solar cell construction which may ultimately make them less expensive, easier to manufacture and more efficient at harvesting energy from the sun.
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Climate change is real, ignore the denialists

Opinion: It’s time to get angry with so-called ‘sceptics’ – before it’s too late 

The conclusions of the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) – the world’s foremost authority on climate-change – delivered late last month were seering and stark: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.”

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Pesticides Linked to Endometriosis Risk

Why some women and not others get endometriosis — the growth of uterine tissue outside the uterus that can cause pain and infertility — is not known, but researchers have come up with one possible contributing factor: pesticide poisoning.
Scientists studied 248 women with surgically confirmed endometriosis and 538 healthy controls. They measured blood levels of two pesticides, mirex and beta HCH, which persist in some fish and dairy products even though their use in the United States has been banned for decades. The study appears online in Environmental Health Perspectives.

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