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New geologic findings about the makeup of the Earth's mantle are helping scientists better understand long-term climate stability and even how seismic waves move through the planet's layers.

In this Review, we outline the history and evolution of the burning embers and associated reasons for concern framework, focusing on the methodological approaches and advances. While the assessment framework and figure design have been broadly retained over time, refinements in methodology have occurred, including the consideration of different risks, use of confidence statements, more formalized protocols and standardized metrics. Comparison across reports reveals that the risk level at a given temperature has generally increased with each assessment cycle, reflecting accumulating scientific evidence. For future assessments, an explicit, transparent and systematic process of expert elicitation is needed to enhance comparability, quality and credibility of burning embers.

Normally, causal influence is assumed to go only one way-from cause to effect-and never back from the effect to the cause-the ringing of a bell does not cause the pressing of the button that triggered it. Now, researchers from the University of Oxford and the Université libre de Bruxelles have developed a theory of causality in quantum theory, according to which cause-effect relations can sometimes form cycles. This theory offers a novel understanding of exotic processes in which events do not have a definite causal order. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

Every time you wash your clothes, thousands of tiny microfibres from the fabric are released into rivers, the sea and the ocean, causing marine pollution. Scientists have speculated for some time that these microfibres may cause more harm than microbeads, which were banned from UK and US consumer products in recent years. Researchers from Northumbria University worked in partnership with Procter & Gamble, makers of Ariel, Tide, Downy and Lenor on the first major forensic study into the environmental impact of microfibres from real soiled household laundry. Their forensic analysis revealed an average of 114 mg of microfibres were released per kilogram of fabric in each wash load during a standard washing cycle.

Any entity or system that we call 'living' will eventually die. This holds at any scale, from cellular level to ecosystems, and even our socio-economic, financial and technological domains. To understand why, it is best to look at a such a system as a infrastructure for a specific saturation process. Large organisms/systems are actually huge ensembles of interacting (and saturating) sub-processes, but here we just consider the 'top-level' saturation process. (At a high, technical abstraction level, this is always the saturation-process of entropy production, and the system is some local maximum of this, but you can read about this in our other publications).