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Dept. of Household Sciences

The Last Word on Nothing Division of Rubbing and Scrubbing On a recent quiet Sunday morning, I resolved to clean the caked-on grime on my stove. A roiling pot of pasta had overflowed one night, and in the rush to get plate to table and food to four-year-old’s mouth, the cloudy starchy water had cured onto the enamel around the burner and now refused to budge. Two earlier attempts to remove the gunk with run-of-the-mill household cleansers had been a waste of time. It was time for the big guns. Mr. Clean’s strong biceps bulged on Magic Eraser packaging, reassuring me … Read more…

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Caribou genetics reveal shadow of climate change

Nature Ancient ice ages that shaped modern caribou populations may foretell animals’ fate in a warmer world. When ice sheets marched across North America 20,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum, they devoured liveable areas for caribou and isolated them from their Eurasian relatives for thousands of years. Now researchers have evidence that such climatic events have sculpted the genetics of North American caribou, which may make the animals unable to adapt to future climate change. “Although the past is not a guarantee for the future, it makes me pessimistic about the future of the species,” says Glenn Yannic, … Read more…

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Lyme bacteria show that evolvability is evolvable

Nature Natural selection favours those with a greater capacity to generate genetic variation. Some gamblers succeed by spiriting cards up their sleeves, giving them a wider range of hands to play. So do some bacteria, whose great capacity for genetic variability helps them evolve and adapt to rapidly changing environments. Now research on Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, shows that the capacity to evolve can itself be the target of natural selection. The results were published today in PLoS Pathogens1. “There are other data that suggest that there could be selection on evolvability, but this is the first example … Read more…

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Ozone-hole treaty slowed global warming

Montreal Protocol helped to curb climate change and so did world wars and the Great Depression. Human actions that were not intended to limit the greenhouse effect have had large effects on slowing climate change. The two world wars, the Great Depression and a 1987 international treaty on ozone-depleting chemicals put a surprising dent in the rate at which the planet warmed, says research published today in Nature Geoscience1. Francisco Estrada, an ecological economist at the Free University in Amsterdam, and his colleagues analysed annual temperature data collected from 1850 to 2010, as well as trends in emissions of greenhouse gases … Read more…