Your average Christmas tree has seven times more DNA than the child taking a sneaky look at the presents underneath its boughs.

"All conifers have 12 chromosomes, but they are extremely large: a cell from a spruce or pine has seven times as much DNA as a human cell does," Science Daily reports.

A team of Swedish researchers from Umeå Plant Science Centre are now going to try and find out why, in what is believed to be the first attempt to map the genome of a conifer.

Bringing us a few steps closer to Osamu Tezuka's miniaturised intra-body adventures, researchers have developed synthetic red blood cells (sRBCs) that are able to perform many of the functions of their biological brethren.

The University of California team first copied the doughnut-like shape of red blood cells, creating a polymer template which was then coated with multiple layers of haemoglobin and other proteins. The polymer core was then removed, affording the synthetic cells the flexibility to squeeze through capillaries even smaller than the sRBCs diameter at rest.

Weaning humanity from its fossil fuel habit will take decades, and it will take decades more for global warming to stop. But one simple measure could slow warming in some of Earth's most sensitive regions, effective immediately - and it would cost just $15 billion (£9 billion).

That's a rough price tag for providing clean stoves to the 500 million households that use open fires, fed by wood and animal dung and coal, to heat their homes and cook. Those fires produce one-quarter of all so-called "black carbon," a sooty pollutant that's adding to the planetary heat burden.

"We know how to cook without smoke," said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a University of California, San Diego climatographer. "A clean stove costs $30 (£18). Multiply that by 500 million households, and it's only $15 billion. This is a solvable problem."

Space is not the only place where special craft can boldly go where no man has gone before.

The Earth’s polar regions are incredibly difficult places for human beings to do science, so researchers are increasingly turning to unmanned aerial vehicles to make the observations they need to understand important environmental changes.

“Everyone knows researchers who have died trying to get data. Hopefully the worst we’re going to have with our unmanned aircraft is we lose a vehicle or two,” polar scientist Betsy Weatherhead of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at UC Boulder, said yesterday at the American Geophysical Union meeting.

A team of US Geological Survey scientists have developed a web service that combines seismic data about an earthquake with Tweets of surprise and angst from the popular microblogging service’s users.

The goal of the project is to improve emergency response by providing a crowdsourced window of the conditions on the ground immediately following a quake.

“Why would such a system work?” asked Paul Earle, a geologist at the USGS, at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting Monday. “Because people like to tweet after an earthquake.”

Looking at a map, one can easily be lulled into thinking that the continents are generally in the right spot.

If you're in front of a globe, you'd be right, but rendering flat maps always introduces some form of topological distortion – try flattening an orange peel to model the essence of the problem. Common solutions include the aesthetically-pleasing Mercator projection, which alters the relative proportions of continents, and the whacked-out Peters projection, which preserves size at the expense of considerable continental warping.

Since each has its drawbacks, this is an area still ripe for new ideas. Computer scientist Jack van Wijk has brought a software engineer's mindset to bear on the problem and devised an ingenious new method for laying out the globe.

Scientists in Germany have taken the humble potato and genetically modified it to produce a new variety that only produces a starch used by the paper, textile and food industries.

The team from the Fraunhofer Institute used a rapid breeding process called Tilling (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes) to create potatoes that contain Amylopectin starch and not Amylose starch – normal breeds contain both.