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Fertilizers are widely used around the world, and the effect of the chemicals in fertilizers on water and soil are immense. In particular, phosphorus has become a concerning chemical because it accumulates in water bodies as well as the landscape. An international team of researchers studied the presence of this chemical in three river basins: the Thames River basin in the U.K., the Maumee River Basin in the mid-western section of the U.S. and the Yangtze River Basin in China. Read more about their research here.

Birds living in urban areas are smarter than those living in the rural areas, according to a team of researchers from McGill University. In this first-ever study to find cognitive differences in birds from city and country, the researchers tested two groups of bullfinches on associative learning tasks and innovative problem-solving tasks. Read more about their research here.

A team of researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center led by Dr. Linda Buck, a biologist and a Nobel Prize winner, has discovered a small area of the mouse brain that plays an important role in fear. They studied the scent-induced fear response in mice by exposing them to the smell of bobcat’s urine, who is their natural predator. Read more about their research here.

Storks are no longer migratory birds, according to a new research conducted by the researchers at the University of East Anglia. Dr. Aldina Franco from UEA's School of Environmental Sciences and her research team observed the behavior of storks that are known to migrate from Europe to Africa. However, since the mid-1980s, an increasing number of these birds have stopped their migratory behavior. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who have been studying the Chinese horseshoe bats have discovered that the bats are carriers of a SARS-like virus, which has the potential of infecting humans with ease. The virus identified by the researchers is called WIV1-CoV and is capable of binding to the same receptors as SARS-CoV. Read more about their research here.

Researchers have been successful in producing cell types that constitute the retina or cornea using pluripotent stem cells. However, they were unable to recreate the complexity of the whole eye development. Now a team of researchers from Cardiff University and Osaka University have used human pluripotent stem cells to generate multiple cell lineages of the eye, including the lens, cornea, and conjunctiva. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at Stanford University have discovered a new method of creating plastic using carbon dioxide and inedible biomass. According to Matthew Kanan, an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford, manufacturing PET “generates more than four tons of CO₂ for every ton of PET that's produced.” Therefore, Kanan and his team developed a green alternative to plastic called polyethylene furandicarboxylate (PEF), which is a product of ethylene glycol and a compound called 2-5-Furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA). Read more about their research here.

Researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Oregon State University, and the U.S. Coast Guard wanted to establish a standard for ambient noise in the Challenger Deep trough in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. However, contrary to the expectation of finding a calm and silent atmosphere, the researchers discovered that the deepest part of the ocean was filled with noises, both natural and human made. Read more about their research here.

Nicholas Whitney of Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., and colleagues observed that nurse sharks are some of the most inactive species of shark that spend most of their time on the ocean bottom waiting in one spot. They only move at night when they have to hunt for food. This behavior interested the researchers in understanding how this affected the shark’s metabolism. Read more about their research here.

A team of researchers led by Wayne Marasco, MD, PhD, a cancer immunologist and virologist at Dana-Farber, found that the immune response to flu vaccines depends largely on an individual’s genetic composition, which in turn related to his or her ethnic background. Read more about their research here.