Roots of deadly 2010 India flood identified; Findings could improve warnings

New research indicates that flash flooding that swept through the mountain town of Leh, India, in 2010 was set off by a string of unusual weather events similar to those that caused devastating flash floods in Colorado and South Dakota in the 1970s.

In a sobering study, researchers measured food-borne toxin exposure in children and adults by pinpointing foods with high levels of toxic compounds and determining how much of these foods were consumed.

Global climate models abound. What is harder to pin down, is how a warmer global temperature might affect any specific region on Earth. Researchers have now made the global local. Using a combination of climate models, they predict how different greenhouse gas scenarios would change the face of Greenland and impact sea level rise.

Yeast cells that share food have a survival edge over their freeloading neighbors — particularly when there is bacterial competition.

Even the very lowest levels of radiation are harmful to life, scientists have concluded, reporting the results of a wide-ranging analysis of 46 peer-reviewed studies published over the past 40 years. Variation in low-level, natural background radiation was found to have small, but highly statistically significant, negative effects on DNA as well as several measures of health.

Big fish that have grown up in marine reserves don’t seem to know enough to avoid fishers armed with spear guns waiting outside the reserve. The latest research by an Australian team working in the Philippines into the effects of marine reserves has found there is an unexpected windfall awaiting fishers who obey the rules and respect reserve boundaries — in the form of big, innocent fish wandering out of the reserve.

A new way to visualize single-cell activity in living zebrafish embryos has allowed scientists to clarify how cells line up in the right place at the right time to receive signals about the next phase of their life.

Why do we get older? When do we die and why? Is there a life without aging? For centuries, science has been fascinated by these questions. Now researchers have examined why the polyp Hydra is immortal — and unexpectedly discovered a link to aging in humans.

Histones — proteins that package DNA — affect cell function differently than previously assumed: the cell doesn’t need the histone H3.3 to read genes. Molecular biologists from Switzerland demonstrate that fruit flies can develop and reproduce in the absence of this histone. Additionally, cell division works without a histone modification previously deemed crucial.