Sadness, more than other emotions, heightens craving to smoke and likelihood of relapse What drives a person to smoke cigarettes—and keeps one out of six U.S. adults addicted to tobacco use, at a cost of 480,000 premature deaths each year despite decades of anti-smoking campaigns? What role do emotions play? Why do some ex-smokers […]
Chickadees are interested in scents. That’s the news from a study out of Lehigh University, the first to document naturally hybridizing songbirds’ preference for the smell of their own species. Amber Rice, an evolutionary biologist at Lehigh, studies hybridization — when separate species come into contact and mate — to better understand how species originate […]
Image-Researchers studied changes in soil microbes in tundra near Denali National Park in Alaska. Credit: Ted Schuur Rising temperatures in the tundra of northern latitudes could affect microbial communities in ways likely to increase their production of the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, a new study of experimentally warmed Alaskan soil suggests. The […]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) have announced that they will jointly fund as much as $25 million in research, and make available additional funding for associated logistical support, to understand a massive Antarctic glacier whose collapse could significantly affect global sea level. NSF and NERC issued a […]