WHAT ALLOWS A BIRD TO FLY ACROSS WIDE OCEANS? …OR FLY FOR MILES AT-PEAKS-AS-HIGH-AS MOUNT EVEREST?

A STUDY CONDUCTED BY A TEAM OF RESEARCHERS AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY AND THE NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY,

HAS-FOUND-THROUGH-A-SERIES-OF-LAB- EXPERIMENTS-AND-COMPUTER-SIMULATIONS,

JUST HOW BIRDS CAN ACCOMPLISH SUCH A DIFFICULT ACTIVITY.

How much carbon can exist on a planet to sustain life? Two studies led by the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota looked at carbon in the early formation of our planet.

SCIENTISTS AT CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY INVESTIGATED THE EFFECTS WILDFIRES HAVE ON CLOUD FORMATION AND THE INTENSE STORMS THAT

CAN DEVELOP FROM THEM.

A TEAM OF ENGINEERS FROM STANFORD UNIVERSITY, SORAMA AND EINDHOVEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY MEASURED FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE-PRECISE-ORIGIN-OF-THE-SOUND-GENERATED-BY-THE-HUMMINGBIRD.

University of Rhode Island researchers embedded nanosensors in the fibers of a bandage, creating a continuous, non-invasive way of detecting and monitoring wound infections. They're testing the technology to see if diagnoses infections at the early stage, resulting in fewer antibiotics and preventing drastic measures, such as limb amputation.

By modeling wolves in Yellowstone National Park, researchers have discovered that how a population is organized into social groups affects the spread of infectious diseases within the population. The findings may be applicable to any social species and could be useful in the protection of endangered species that suffer from disease outbreaks.

A University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University study finds bees and other pollinators play an extremely important role in agriculture. One key finding is that the economic value of insect pollination totaled $34 billion in 2012, the most recent year for which data were available. At the same time, areas most reliant economically on pollination services are where pollinator habitat and forage quality are poor.

By monitoring electrical signals from the sleeping participants' brain and eyes, researchers at Northwestern University, along with scientists in France, Germany and the Netherlands, have independently demonstrated two-way communication with people as they are lucidly dreaming during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. The breakthrough challenges current paradigms of human consciousness.

Michigan State University researchers have shown that soil bacteria known as Geobacter are effective cobalt "miners," extracting the rare, toxic metal from rust without letting it penetrate their cells and kill them. Geobacter could form the basis of new biotechnology to reclaim and recycle cobalt from lithium-ion batteries, reducing the nation's dependence on foreign cobalt mines.

MIT researchers devised a new way to computationally look at viral escape, based on models that were originally developed to analyze language. Their model can predict which sections of viral surface proteins are more likely to mutate in a way that enables viral escape. It can also identify sections that are less likely to mutate, making them good targets for new vaccines, possibly even one for cancer.