Photo credit: www.sciencedaily.com (Visscher lab, UC, Riverside) (left); www.nytimes.com (Rodridgo Cruz) (right)

• With climate talks taking place in Durban, South Africa this past week, there have been a number of articles on climate science, including the record rise in carbon emissions in the last year, the projections of future climate impacts based on historic records, and Greenland's rising land mass.
• Foresters at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) note that the connections between accelerating deforestation and climate change throughout Africa are threatening wildlife and ecosystem resilience on the continent.
• Researchers at University of California-Riverside and Cornell University have observed bee behavior that emulates neuropathways in primate decision-making.  Bees use "stop signaling" in determining hive location, only instead of firing neurons like in the brain of a monkey, one bee communicates the "stop signal" to the other bee.
• US Batteries have become a cause for concern in Mexico where they are shipped for recycling, with growing lead contamination in populations around recycling factories.  The article's author follows up with an opinion piece  suggesting how we should recycle batteries.
• A research student at the University of Rhode Island is chronicling her traumatic and triumphant research experiences while studying mammal diversity on coffee plantations in Costa Rica for the NYTimes "Scientist at Work" blog series.  The blog series "is the modern version of a field journal, a place for reports on the daily progress of scientific expeditions."
• The EPA recently completed a three-year study on hydraulic fracturing in Wyoming and its impacts on local water sources, noting chemical contamination not found through natural processes.  
• Researchers demonstate that the the greatest decrease in African great ape populations comes in areas where local law enforcement has little or no presence, indicating very little protection from poaching.