Nearly two-thirds of the Indian population depends on agriculture for their livelihood.  Disruptions in rainfall pattern affect them all as most of the agricultural land is rain-fed. Over  the second half of the 20 th century, levels of grain production have fallen due to deficiencies  in rainfall. Are the errant monsoon rains linked to the rising levels of pollution? A study  from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay says so. The researchers, Mr Prashant Dave,  Prof. Mani Bhushan and Prof. Chandra Venkatraman have discovered that aerosols cause  aggravated breaks in the monsoon, which could significantly influence drought and impact  agriculture.

When spraying paint or coatings onto a surface, or fertilizers or pesticides onto crops, the size of the droplets makes a big difference. Bigger drops will drift less in the wind, allowing them to strike their intended targets more accurately, but smaller droplets are more likely to stick when they land instead of bouncing off.

Now, a team of MIT researchers has found a way to balance those properties and get the best of both — sprays that don’t drift too far but provide tiny droplets to stick to the surface. The team accomplished this in a surprisingly simple way, by placing a fine mesh in between the spray and the intended target to break up droplets into ones that are only one-thousandth as big.

Low-tech ways of improving soil quality on farms and rangelands worldwide could pull significant amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and slow the pace of climate change, according to a new UC  Berkeley study.

The researchers found that well-established agricultural management practices such as planting cover crops, optimizing grazing and sowing legumes on rangelands, if instituted globally, could capture enough carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil to make a significant contribution to international global warming targets.

Chronic rhinosinusitis is distinct from your average case of seasonal allergies. It causes the sinuses to become inflamed and swollen for months to years at a time, leading to difficulty breathing and other symptoms that make patients feel miserable. In some people, this condition also produces tissue outgrowths known as nasal polyps, which, when severe enough, have to be removed surgically.

By performing a genome-wide analysis of thousands of single cells from human patients, MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have created the first global cellular map of a human barrier tissue during inflammation. Analysis of this data led them to propose a novel mechanism that may explain what sustains chronic rhinosinusitis.

Ageing in worms mainly results from the direct action of genes and not from random wear and tear or loss of function, and the same is likely to be true in humans, according to research by UCL, Lancaster University and Queen Mary University of London scientists.

The study, published in Current Biology and funded by Wellcome, shows that normal biological processes which are useful early on in life, continue to ‘run-on’ pointlessly in later life causing age-related diseases.