Aurorae are detected from all the magnetized planets in our Solar System, including Earth. They are powered by magnetospheric current systems that lead to the precipitation of energetic electrons into the high-latitude regions of the upper atmosphere.

The human lens is comprised largely of crystallin proteins assembled into a highly ordered, interactive macro-structure essential for lens transparency and refractive index. Any disruption of intra- or inter-protein interactions will alter this delicate structure, exposing hydrophobic surfaces, with consequent protein aggregation and cataract formation. Cataracts are the most common cause of blindness worldwide, affecting tens of millions of people1, and currently the only treatment is surgical removal of cataractous lenses.

Governments should not meet existing conservation targets using the compensation that developers pay for damaging biodiversity, say Martine Maron and colleagues.

Original Source

Ecologists and space agencies must forge a global monitoring strategy, say Andrew K. Skidmore, Nathalie Pettorelli and colleagues.

They are 5 billion kilometres from the Sun in the dim, far-flung outskirts of the Solar System, but Pluto and its large moon Charon turn out to be astonishingly vital worlds. Images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which flew within 12,500 kilometres of Pluto on 14 July, reveal frosty plains, soaring mountains and much more geological activity than anyone anticipated.

Original Source

ust three years ago, Nigeria was a threat to the global push to eradicate polio. Africa’s most populous nation recorded 122 cases in 2012, more than all other countries combined, and funders of the eradication campaign were growing exasperated with the nation’s faltering vaccination efforts and exportation of cases. Now Nigeria is on the brink of being free of the virus, thanks in large part to its embrace of innovative approaches to vaccination and public health.

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is the major source of variability in winter atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere, with large impacts on temperature, precipitation and storm tracks, and therefore also on strategic sectors such as insurance, renewable energy production, crop yields and water management. Recent developments in dynamical methods offer promise to improve seasonal NAO predictions, but assessing potential predictability on multi-annual timescales requires documentation of past low-frequency variability in the NAO.

Researchers are racing to determine whether forests will continue to act as a brake on climate change by soaking up more carbon.

Sex determination in animals is amazingly plastic. Vertebrates display contrasting strategies ranging from complete genetic control of sex (genotypic sex determination) to environmentally determined sex (for example, temperature-dependent sex determination). Phylogenetic analyses suggest frequent evolutionary transitions between genotypic and temperature-dependent sex determination in environmentally sensitive lineages, including reptiles. These transitions are thought to involve a genotypic system becoming sensitive to temperature, with sex determined by gene–environment interactions.

Surface weather conditions are closely governed by the large-scale circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Recent increases in the occurrence of some extreme weather phenomena have led to multiple mechanistic hypotheses linking changes in atmospheric circulation to increasing probability of extreme events. However, observed evidence of long-term change in atmospheric circulation remains inconclusive.