The brain has always been a bit mysterious. How does it all work so that a human being can live, breathe and talk. The brain is composed of two broad classes of cells: neurons and glia. These two types are equally numerous in the brain as a whole, although glial cells outnumber neurons roughly 4…

Titan, is the largest moon of Saturn, the only natural satellite known to have a dense atmosphere, and the only object other than Earth for which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found. On Earth, lake levels rise and fall with the seasons and with longer term climate changes, as precipitation,…

One does not think often about vast herds of horses or burros. However, there are a few herds here and there and they need to be protected and maintained. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced today that it has issued a new policy handbook relating to the management of wild horses and burros roaming…

Changing sea levels have happened before and will happen again in a dynamic world. Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean, including the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, appear to be at least partly a result of human induced increases of atmospheric…

It is summer and it is traditional to complain about how warm it is. Weather also is always a popular subject. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) State of the Climate report shows the June 2010 average temperature for the contiguous United States was 71.4 degrees F, which is 2.2 degrees F above the…

Integrated environmental modeling is a discipline of developing a system of models where models from two or more academic disciplines are integrated such that they behave like a unit to external stimuli. At least one of the models in the system is from environmental domain while others may come from other academic disciplines such as…

Upper atmospheric lightning or upper atmospheric discharge are terms sometimes used by researchers to refer to a family of electrical breakdown phenomena that occur well above the altitudes of normal lightning. The preferred current usage is transient luminous events (TLEs) to refer to the various types of electrical discharge phenomena in the upper atmosphere, because…

Deep down in the earth are tremendously high pressures. What happens under high pressure is not the same as what happens at lower pressures. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicists are using an ultra fast laser based technique they dubbed nanoshocks for something entirely different. In fact, the nanoshocks have such a small spatial scale that…

Over 10,000 years ago in the Americas, there were many more large mammals than today epitomized by the mammoth. The extinction of woolly mammoths and other large mammals more than 10,000 years ago may be explained by the same type of cascade of ecosystem disruption that is being caused today by the global decline of…

The dark deeps of the ocean has always been mysterious because they are dark (of course) as well hard to visit and see what is down there. For example the Coelacanth, long thought extinct, lives down deep and was only discovered in 1938 as well the elusive giant squids of legend. A study of the…