Science News

Experiments on animals have been the subject of criticism for decades, but there is no prospect of a move away from them any time soon. The number of tests involving laboratory animals has in fact gone up. Now, researchers have found an alternative approach: they hope sensor nanoparticles will reduce the need for animal testing.

So-called “citizen scientists” are tapping into the power of the internet and exchanging information among like-minded individuals to learn more about specific diseases, often genetic disorders, usually in response to general dissatisfaction with the medical and research establishment as a whole. The movement is the latest manifestation of regular people who share a focused interest and who want to contribute more knowledge that will improve the understanding of that specific interest. For example, citizen scientists previously have formed associations where they investigate and provide information to scientists on subjects such as bird migrations, global warming, and their observations of various astronomical events.

For much of the last 250 million years the Earth has been warmer than today. Around 50 million years ago during the early Cenozoic era, the climate began to cool. A key threshold was crossed 35 million years ago and the Antarctic ice sheet began to grow – the first continental scale ice sheet in 300 million years that ultimately led to the establishment of our modern icehouse climate system. Using a combination of laboratory measurements and computer modelling to unravel the sequence of events, this project aims to understand what caused this fundamental transition of Earth’s climate from a warm “greenhouse” to relatively frigid “icehouse”.

The hunt for elusive neutrinos will soon get its largest and most powerful tool yet: the enormous KM3NeT telescope, currently under development by a consortium of 40 institutions from ten European countries.