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The collapse of China's prosperous Ming dynasty, one of the most stable in Chinese history, has been attributed, in part, to the 1641 eruption of a volcano thousands of kilometres from the imperial capital in Beijing.

Noise limits the performance of modern quantum technologies. However, particles traveling in a superposition of paths can bypass noise in communication. A collaboration between the Universities of Hong-Kong, Grenoble and Vienna, as well as the Austrian Academy of Sciences, under the lead of Philip Walther, reveals novel techniques to reduce noise in quantum communication. The results, published in the latest issue of Physical Review Research, demonstrate that quantum particles traveling in a superposition of paths enable noise reduction in communications.

Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.

A fish school is a striking demonstration of synchronicity. Yet centuries of study have left a basic question unanswered: Do fish save energy by swimming in schools? Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB), the University of Konstanz, and Peking University have provided an answer that has long been suspected but never conclusively supported by experiments: yes.

The phenomenon where a mutation overrides another genetic defect is known as genetic suppression and it is not unique to yeasts. Genome sequencing studies have revealed individuals who remain healthy despite carrying catastrophic inborn errors whose usual harmful effects are somehow masked by other unknown changes in their genomes.