BBC Focus Magazine

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100201171641.htm

Forests Are Growing Faster, Ecologists Discover; Climate Change Appears to Be Driving Accelerated Growth



Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/fro ... l?digest=1

THE HSE has said it hopes the retraction of a flawed study linking the MMR vaccine with autism will result in an increase in vaccination rates.

The comments come after prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, yesterday retracted from the public record a controversial research paper which linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism. The paper had resulted in a severe drop in vaccinations. ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 493089.stm

A tiny rodent may have the most sophisticated language of any animal.

This bold claim comes from US-based academic Professor Con Slobodchikoff who has long studied the vocal repertoire of Gunnison's prairie dog.

With a single bark, he says, a prairie dog may warn about the type and direction of an encroaching predator, and even describe its colour.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8489097.stm

President Barack Obama has cancelled the American project designed to take humans back to the Moon.

The Constellation programme envisaged new rockets and a new crewship called Orion to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2020.

But in his federal budget request issued on Monday, Mr Obama said the project was "over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation".

It was draining resources from other US ...

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/ ... 804984.htm

A new study claims our Moon could have been born from a blob of the Earth's mantle, blasted outwards by the explosion of a runaway nuclear georeactor.

If correct, it would replace the scientifically accepted model for the origins of the Moon, known as the 'giant impact theory'.

Came across this this morning:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/dealsAndOffers/promo/id/100
The site is offering 1000s of free ebooks in pdf format. I've been sitting donwloading quite a few... it may a strain on the eyes, but it's probably worth it to get some free literature. Mostly it's classics - which means there's a lot of good Jules Verne and HG Wells there.

Scientists have for the first time confirmed colour in a dinosaur. It is reddish-orange.

The first solid proof of pigmentation has been spotted in the fossilised tail feathers of a smallish meat-eating dinosaur found in China and named Sinosauropteryx. The creature seems to have russet-coloured rings, according to a paper published online on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

That 125-million-year-old tail has the same internal cellular colouring agents as the hair of a red-haired person, ...

This might be of interest to British people.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... o-picture/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8485669.stm

Hmmmm. This year, really?

I thought this http://xkcd.com/695/ was quite sad...



:D

Science related XKCD comic thread rulz!