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Current Environment News Events, Discoveries and Articles

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Octopuses focus on key features for successful camouflage
Octopuses camouflage themselves by matching their body pattern to selected features of nearby objects, rather than trying to match the entire larger field of view, according to new research published in the open access journal PLoS ONE. (2012-05-24)

Engineers use droplet microfluidics to create glucose-sensing microbeads
Cell cultures need glucose for energy, but too much sugar can create a diabetic-like environment in which cell proteins undergo unwanted structural changes. (2012-05-21)

Genes may hold the key to a life of success, study suggests
Genes play a greater role in forming character traits - such as self-control, decision making or sociability - than was previously thought, new research suggests. (2012-05-17)

Research: Too much, too little noise turns off consumers, creativity
The sound of silence isn't so golden for consumers, and both marketers and advertisers should take note, says new research from a University of Illinois expert in new product development and marketing. (2012-05-15)

'Fertilizing' bone marrow helps answer why some cancers spread to bones
Researchers found that administering a common chemotherapy drug before bone tumors took root actually fertilized the bone marrow, enabling cancer cells, once introduced, to seed and grow more easily. (2012-05-15)

IBEX Reveals a Missing Boundary At the Edge Of the Solar System
For the last few decades, space scientists have generally accepted that the bubble of gas and magnetic fields generated by the sun - known as the heliosphere - moves through space, creating three distinct boundary layers that culminate in an outermost bow shock. (2012-05-11)

Improved Waiting Area Design Increases Customer Comfort, MU Study Finds
Many diners cringe at the thought of waiting for a table in a crowded restaurant, while restaurant managers hope they do not lose customers due to long waits. (2012-05-10)

Virtual reality allows researchers to measure brain activity during behavior at unprecedented resolution
Researchers have developed a new technique which allows them to measure brain activity in large populations of nerve cells at the resolution of individual cells. (2012-05-10)

EARTH: Volcanoes sparked, and prolonged, the Little Ice Age
olcanism is often implicated in periods of abrupt cooling. After the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, for instance, global temperatures dropped by half a degree Celsius due to airborne particulate matter blocking solar radiation. (2012-05-10)

Biodiversity loss ranks with climate change and pollution in terms of impacts to environment
A recent study published by an international research team working at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) has found that loss of biodiversity impacts the environment as significantly as climate change and pollution. (2012-05-10)