Researchers have identified a pair of genes that increase a child's risk of developing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) before the age of 19--adding to a growing list of 30 known genetic factors for the malady.

Inflammatory bowel disease is a chronic condition that affects an estimated 1.4 million people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) . Abnormal immune responses lead to inflammation in the digestive tract lining causing several disorders, the most common of which are Crohn's disease (usually affecting the small intestine) and ulcerative colitis (restricted to the colon). [More]

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that increasing eco-awareness around the world has now extended itself to the afterlife, whereby burials can even be “green.” Is that true? -- Mary Lewis, Duxbury, MA

Editor's Note: This story was originally published in the October 2001 issue of Scientific American.

The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."

SEPTEMBER 1958THE CREATIVE PROCESS-- “The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. --Jacob Bronowski”

Greenland, the world's largest island, holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 23 feet (seven meters). Add the ice sheets of Antarctica and the oceans would deepen more than 200 feet (60 meters). Satellite measurements from space and speed measurements on land confirm that Greenland's glaciers are melting and on the move. And although the picture is less clear in Antarctica, the global warming seems to be having an impact there, too.

So the question is: How much--and how soon--will sea level rise?

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

 What a long, strange evolutionary trip. The last of the woolly mammoths had North American, not Asian roots, new science suggests. [More]

Researchers have discovered that the same nerve cells involved in forming memories also are involved in replaying them. The finding, published today in the online edition of Science, provides new insight into how complex memories are laid down in a single neuron (nerve cell) and how neural firing, or communication, patterns created during memory formation are maintained during recall. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the deal nowadays with aerosol spray cans? I thought that the ozone-depleting chemicals used in them were eliminated back in the 1970s. Is this true? If so, what is now used as a propellant? Are aerosols still bad for the ozone layer? -- Sheila, Abilene, TX