Feature Article

It's chemistry's greatest challenge – inventing systems that turn water and sunshine efficiently into cheap, clean energy for all.

It's time for evolution to take centre stage in the practice of medicine, says the world's first "Darwinian paediatrician" Paul Turke.

Controlling smog and soot is the classic win-win situation, so it's great that the world is finally waking up to the idea, says Drew Shindell.

Women living in an illegally polluted region of Italy are more likely to have birth defects, possibly due to accelerated ageing of their cells.

Marine species with relatively low migratory capacity are threatened by habitat alterations derived from human activities. In November 2002 the tanker Prestige sank off the Spanish northwest coast releasing 70,000 tons of fuel and damaging biota in the area. Despite efforts to clean the damaged areas, fuel remnants have affected marine species over the last nine years. This study is focused on two flatfish, Lepidorhombus boscii (four-spotted megrim) and L. whiffiagonis (megrim), whose spawning areas are located at the edge of the continental platform.

The obesity epidemic that is prevailing in most countries of the world is generally attributed to the increased amount of opportunities to be in positive energy balance in a context of modernity. This obviously refers not only to sedentariness and unhealthy eating that may dominate life habits of many individuals but also to unsuspected non-caloric factors which produce discrete allostatic changes in the body. In this paper, the focus is put on the impact of some of these factors with the preoccupation to document the allostatic burden of weight loss.

Plant phenology models, especially leafing models, play critical roles in evaluating the impact of climate change on the primary production of temperate plants. Existing models based on temperature alone could not accurately simulate plant leafing in arid and semi-arid regions.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill triggered a complex cascade of microbial responses that reshaped the dynamics of heterotrophic carbon degradation and the turnover of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in oil contaminated waters. Our results from 21-day laboratory incubations in rotating glass bottles (roller bottles) demonstrate that microbial dynamics and carbon flux in oil-contaminated surface water sampled near the spill site two weeks after the onset of the blowout were greatly affected by activities of microbes associated with macroscopic oil aggregates.

The Tibetan Plateau is an essential area to study the potential feedback effects of soils to climate change due to the rapid rise in its air temperature in the past several decades and the large amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks, particularly in the permafrost. Yet it is one of the most under-investigated regions in soil respiration (Rs) studies.