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Like cars, some microbes use oil as fuel. Such microorganisms are a big reason why BP’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not far worse. “The microbes did a spectacular job of eating a lot of the natural gas,” says biogeochemist Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The relatively small hydrocarbon molecules in natural gas are the easiest for microorganisms to eat. “The rate and capacity is a mind-boggling testament to microbes,” he adds....

I have often seen a crazy statistic which states that somewhere between 65 and 80 percent of runners end up injured before they reach their goal race. Whether it is 65 percent or 80, that is a pretty shocking number. There are steps that we can take to protect ourselves and avoid the disappointment of becoming an injured statistic. Because, like most things in life, being successful really comes down to preparing properly....

(Reuters) - The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) urged customers to conserve electricity on Tuesday after customers the day before used record amounts of power for air conditioning to obtain relief from a heat wave. Demand reached 6,196 megawatts on Monday, beating the previous record of 6,177 MWs on Sept. 27, 2010, the utility said in a statement late Monday. That was nearly double the amount of energy customers use on a typical day in the city, the utility said....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Enormous cloud-like plumes reaching 260km above the surface of Mars have left scientists baffled. This is way beyond Mars’s normal weather, reaching into the exosphere where the atmosphere merges with interplanetary space. None of the conventional explanations for such clouds make sense—neither water or carbon dioxide ice nor dust storms nor auroral light emissions usually hit such heights....

HUMAN LEAPS The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran. W. W. Norton, 2011 ($26.95) While giving a lecture at a hospital in Chennai, India, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran met a young man with a strange problem. “What brings you to our hospital?” asked Ramachandran, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. “I am a corpse—I can smell the stench of rotting flesh,” the young man replied....

By Jeff Mason ANAHEIM Calif. (Reuters) - With a feisty tone and a touch of aggravation, President Barack Obama on Saturday laid into Republicans who question the science of climate change and urged graduating college students to take on global warming as a cause. A few weeks after unveiling rules to limit carbon emissions from power plants, Obama used a commencement address for the University of California, Irvine, to rally support from young people and slam opponents for denying that climate change is real....

Can good economic times roll while carbon emissions decline? Maybe so. Last week the Obama administration proposed new rulesto regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from existing power plants under the auspices of the Clean Air Act. Once EPA officially publishes the rule in the Federal Register (most likely in a week or two), a 120-day comment period will ensue when all are invited to send “constructive” comments to the agency on the rule’s shortcomings and what should be done to fix them....

By David Stanway BEIJING (Reuters) - Almost all Chinese cities monitored for pollution last year failed to meet state standards, the vice-minister of environmental protection said on Saturday as he outlined the country’s plans to redress the environmental consequences of rapid industrialization. Out of the 74 cities that Beijing monitored, 71 had various degrees of problems, Wu Xiaoqing said at a news conference on the sidelines of the annual parliament session in Beijing....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog The tragic death of Internet-freedom activist Aaron Swartz, a Taiwanese researcher’s findings on trial for libel, and inflated impact factors were some of the most popular stories on our Newsblog in 2013. Experiments reveal that crabs and lobsters feel pain 7 August 2013 66 journals banned for boosting impact factor with self-citations 19 June 2013 Another dark-matter sign from a Minnesota mine 15 April 2013...

Two years ago, several research vessels shipped out to the North and the South poles to assemble a census of creatures living under the ice. One of the most surprising results was a discovery that 235 identical species lived on opposite sides of the world but were undocumented anywhere else. It’s easy to understand how massive humpbacks can swim from Arctic to Antarctic waters, but most of the miniature worms, snails and crustaceans on the researchers’ list are no bigger than grains of rice....

Key concepts Coordination Endurance Speed Introduction Have you ever wondered how you could do jump rope faster? The U.S. jump-rope record for the greatest number of jumps in one minute is 367! That’s more than six jumps a second! How close do you think you can get to that number? What are some of the factors that will help you jump faster? One is the length of the jump rope!...

Monitoring an array of 225 cameras throughout Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park presented wildlife researchers with an enviable dilemma. They had captured millions of images of life on the African savanna over 18 months, including lions taking down zebras and bat-eared foxes chasing aardwolves. The time had come to classify the curious creatures in every photograph. University of Oxford postdoc Alexandra Swanson and her colleagues found the solution in citizen science, tapping into a network of more than 28,000 registered volunteers who identified the animals in the photos with 96 percent accuracy....

When officials with the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory saw one of these endangered birds last year, it was no laughing matter. It was dead. It was one of 233 birds recovered from the sites of three Californian desert solar power plants as part of a federal investigation. The laboratory’s wildlife equivalents of CSI stars concluded that many of the birds had been fatally singed, broken, or otherwise fatally crippled by the facilities....

When phobics are exposed to what they fear–be it spiders or public speaking–they experience a surge in stress hormones known as glucocorticoids. These compounds help prepare the body for action, whether fight or flight. Now researchers have found that further raising levels of the stress hormones in the body can actually reduce a phobic’s anxiety. Dominique de Quervain and his colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland recruited 40 men who suffered from a fear of public speaking....

One of the most controversial issues in neuroscience is the use of our fellow primates as research subjects. Their similarities to humans in cognitive capacity, social complexity and neuroanatomy make them essential models for understanding the brain—yet these same attributes also single them out for special protection. In recent years European countries have passed increasingly strict regulations for experiments with nonhuman primates, leading many neuroscientists to fear for the future of their research....

Waters, a tall, rumpled man in his mid-fifties with intense blue eyes and a slow, cautious way of talking, does not look or sound like a maverick. But his work is helping to topple an enduring model for the peopling of the New World. For decades scientists thought the first Americans were Asian big-game hunters who tracked mammoths and other large prey eastward across a now submerged landmass known as Beringia that joined northern Asia to Alaska....

Outbreaks of infectious disease are becoming more common in many parts of the world. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of outbreaks reported worldwide more than tripled every five years. Unexpected outbreaks caused by viruses such as Ebola and Zika have led researchers to seek faster and cheaper strategies for addressing pathogenic agents they know little about. These strategies include using laboratory-made, monoclonal antibodies that can immediately bind to and neutralize specific viruses or bacteria in a person who has been infected, but also protect, for a time, anyone who is likely to be exposed to a particular pathogenic species....

The grasslands of Europe may seem like a simple ecosystem, lacking the rich array of species that inhabit tropical rain forests. But a new study probing the response of relatively simple meadows to reductions in the diversity of native plants reveals that biodiversity plays a key role in ensuring the broadest range of ecosystem services, such as clean water and fertile soil. Previous studies have shown that for specific ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling, biodiversity did not seem to matter....

Yellowstone burned for three months in 1988, destroying more than 600,000 hectares of forest. The fire resisted the best efforts of 25,000 firefighters and only flickered out with the first snow in mid-September of that year. This catastrophic wildfire in the western U.S. may have heralded a new era of bigger and more frequent fires thanks to climate change, according to new research. Anthony Westerling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and his colleagues compiled a database of all western wildfires from 1970 through 2003 that burned more than 1,000 acres: 1,166 in all....

China and the United States announced plans on November 12 to substantially reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, in what might signify a historic breakthrough in international efforts to limit climate change. Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing, US President Barack Obama pledged to cut total US greenhouse-gas emissions by 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2025. At the same time, President Xi Jinping said that China will stop its emissions from growing by 2030 at the latest....