A study conducted in four American Indian communities in the Pacific Northwest presents an effective strategy to convince mothers to switch young children from drinking sweetened soda to water and shows that eliminating these sugary drinks from the diets of the youngest members of the tribe significantly decreased tooth decay. The results of the dental arm of “The Toddler Overweight and Tooth Decay Prevention Study” (TOTS), which targeted American Indians from birth to 30 months of age, appear in the current issue (Volume 20, Number 4) of the peer reviewed journal Ethnicity & Disease . The arrival of Europeans brought diseases such as measles, influenza and smallpox to the Americas.

A team of biologists has discovered an entirely new group of algae living in a variety of marine and freshwater environments.

Just over a year after the earthquake in Haiti killed 222,000 people there's a new problem that is killing Haitians. A cholera outbreak has doctors in the area scrambling and the water-borne illness has already claimed 3600 lives according to officials with Médicin Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders)

Researchers at Northwestern University have created a robotic fish that can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a sophisticated, ribbon-like fin. The robot — created after observing and creating computer simulations of the black ghost knifefish — could pave the way for nimble robots that could perform underwater recovery operations or long-term monitoring of coral reefs. Led by Malcolm MacIver, associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, the team’s results are published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface

New research indicates the impact of rising CO 2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause unstoppable effects to the climate for at least the next 1000 years, causing researchers to estimate a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet by the year 3000, and an eventual rise in the global sea level of at least four metres. The study, to be published in the Jan

The Australian Government National Water Commission funded a study to establish an approach to assess the quality of water treated using managed aquifer recharge.