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Birds are doing it, now trees are too.

All over the world, trees are moving to new places to escape warmer temperatures. They are taking root at higher elevations as well. But this isn’t happening in response to hot summer temperatures: warmer WINTER temperatures are the cause.

In BBC News, Matt Walker quotes biologist Melanie Harsch as saying, “We expected growing season warming to be the dominant driver, but we found that it was not, winter temperature was.”

Walking outdoors in the fall in Europe, you can enjoy the lovely yellow leaves, while the US and East Asia, the turning leaves are mostly red. What causes the differences in autumn leaves around the world? The answer goes back 35 million years.
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The methane frozen in the ocean floor is a global warming time bomb. There may have been small leaks before, but now scientists say melting Arctic glaciers are releasing huge amounts of this potent gas into the atmosphere.

In BBC News, Judith Burns quotes researcher Tim Minshull as saying, “We already knew there was some methane hydrate in the ocean off Spitsbergen [a large Norwegian island] and that’s an area where climate change is happening rather faster than just about anywhere else in the world.”
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Speaking different languages is hard enough, but interpreting facial expressions differently only adds to the confusion when people from different places try to communicate! When Asians migrate to US and open small businesses, there is sometimes a lot of misunderstanding, because smiling at strangers is considered rude in many Asian countries, while Americans can be put off by what they perceive as coldness. This is just another example of the fact that different cultures read facial expressions differently.

On BBC News, Judith Burns reports that researchers discovered that Asians focus mainly on the eyes, Westerners scan the entire face, therefore they were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for “fear” as “surprise” and “disgust” as “anger.”
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Stress can make you fat and fat can make you sick.

A new study shows that social stress can lead to heart disease by causing the body to deposit more fat in the abdominal cavity, speeding the harmful buildup of plaque in blood vessels, a stepping stone to the number one cause of death in the world. If we’re stressed, we tend to overeat, and that’s the start of the problem.

Researcher Carol A. Shively says, “We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Much of the excess fat in many people who are overweight is located in the abdomen, and that fat behaves differently than fat in other locations. If there’s too much, it can have far more harmful effects on health than fat located in other areas.”
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