Also Try Science Current Events Archives Science News Sources Lists New Planets New planets have been discovered and they are outside of our solar system (extrasolar). The first extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995. syst Multimedia -12-24-11 "Mirror Neurons" Associated with Empathy (Scientific American) "This video segment, adapted from NOVA scienceNow, describes the recent discovery and implications of mirror neurons, a specific kind of brain cell that fires both when performing an action and when observing someone else perform the same action. It turns out that mirror neurons, which are normally associated with physical activities, might also be responsible for signaling the human brain's emotional system, which in turn allows us to empathize with other people. Their failure to work normally might explain why some people, including autistic people, do not interact well with others." 12-11 Pictures and Sounds of Galaxies (CosmicLog.msnbc.msn.com) "Help yourself to the biggest pictures and the coolest sounds from space." 06-08 News -01-08-12 Cognitive Decline May Start at 45 (Time.com) "A new study of British civil servants shows that cognitive skills such as memory and reasoning are already declining, typically, among people as young as 45." 01-12 -01-11-12 Really Smart Blocks (Time.com) "Think of Cubelets as robotic building blocks that behave differently depending on how you assemble them, like a simple form of programming where you just snap functions together to get results." 01-12 -01-11-20 HIgh School Student Finds a Possible Cure for Cancer (CBS News) "Angela's idea was to mix cancer medicine in a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles -- nanoparticles that would then attach to cancer cells and show up on an MRI. so doctors could see exactly where the tumors are. Then she thought shat if you aimed an infrared light at the tumors to melt the polymer and release the medicine, thus killing the cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed." "It'll take years to know if it works in humans -- but in mice -- the tumors almost completely disappeared." 01-12 -01-26-11 Oldest Galaxy Ever Found (Time.com) "The newly discovered star cluster — a hundred times smaller than our own Milky Way — was formed just 480 million years after the 13.7 billion year-old universe itself was born, making it easily the oldest galaxy ever found." 01-11 -01-31-12 Advantages of the Middle-Age Brain (Time.com) "A study in the British Medical Journal lit up the Internet last week with the conclusion that cognitive decline begins at age 45. While it’s true that some innate skills like memory and speed of reasoning fall off as we age, other aspects of intelligence related to learning and experience actually improve." 01-12 -02-02-11 Many Planets Found Outside Our Solar System (ABC News) "NASA's planet-hunting telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life. An early report from a cosmic census indicates that relatively small planets and stable multi-planet systems are far more plentiful than previous searches showed." 02-11 -02-02-11 Six New Unusual Planets Discovered (MSNBC News) "Lissauer said he rated the finding as the 'biggest thing in exoplanets' since the 1995 discovery of 51 Pegasi, the first extrasolar planet detected around a sunlike star. Yale astronomer Debra Fischer, a planet-hunting pioneer who was not involved in the Kepler-11 study, agreed. 'With five low-mass planets in the system, this discovery is as momentous as 51 Peg was in 1995,' she said today during a NASA news briefing." 02-11 -02-02-12 Potentially Habitable Planet Found (CBS News) "A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface." 02-12 -02-03-12 New Land-Based "Adaptive" Telescope (Time.com) "According to astronomer Francois Rigaut, who led the team that built the new hardware, its images rival the Hubble's for sharpness, and in a press release, Matt Mountain, director of the Hubble's home base, the Space Telescope Science Institute, called the image quality 'incredible.' " 02-12 -02-10-11 Worms Move Up on Tree of Life (CBS News) "With the new study results, the researchers say the two worm groups constitute an entirely new division of life, or phylum, which they name the xenacoelomorpha. This phylum would join the three known phyla of deuterostomes: vertebrates (animals with a backbone, including humans); echinoderms (such as starfish), and hemichordates (such as acorn worms)." "Being such simple creatures and yet still mixing and mingling on the family tree with us complex creatures suggests these marine worms were once complex themselves, Telford said." 02-11 -03-26-11 Stem Cells, Disease, and Aging (New York Times) "Thomas Rando, a researcher at Stanford University, thinks stem-cell treatments may enhance healing in older patients who have difficulty recovering from surgery or a fracture. But he's also thinking about deeper issues involving the power of regenerative medicine. 'There are very basic questions I hope we can make headway on using stem cells — in terms of understanding cellular aging, how that's related to tissue aging and the aging of an organism,' he says. Which leads to the interesting possibility that with stem cells, we may no longer define age as how old we think we are but as how old our cells tell us we are." 03-11 -03-28-11 Boy Genius Challenges Einstein's Theory of Relativity (Time.com) "Could Einstein's Theory of Relativity be a few mathematical equations away from being disproved? Jacob Barnett of Hamilton County, Ind., who is just weeks shy of his 13th birthday, thinks so. And, he's got the solutions to prove it." 03-11 -04-07-11 Who Has a Better Brain: Liberals or Conservatives? (CBS News) "The brains of people who call themselves liberals tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes than the brains of people on the opposite side of the political spectrum, the study showed. The anterior cingulate cortex is a collar-shaped region around the corpus collosum, a structure that relays signals between the right and left hemispheres of the brain." "What about conservatives? Their brains brains tend to have larger amygdalas. The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure located deep within the brain." "Based upon what brain scientists know about the function of the two brain regions, researchers believe the structural differences support the notion that liberals are better equipped to make sense of conflicting information while conservatives are better able to recognize a threat." 04-11 -04-25-11 Amazing Photos of Mars (Time.com) Provides photos. 04-11 -04-25-11 Ocean of Carbon Dioxide Found on Mars (Time.com) "A series of measurements with ground-penetrating radar mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed a massive deposit of frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) — a Lake Superior's worth of dry ice — buried under a layer of ordinary ice near the Martian south pole." "The extra CO2 in Mars' atmosphere wouldn't be enough to do much warming, says Phillips, but it's not without effect. For one thing, the thicker air would be enough to allow water to exist on the surface at lower elevations. The oceans of Mars won't return, and probably not the rivers — but creeks and ponds would be possible."  04-11 -05-03-11 New Assessment of Autism (Time.com) "There's been a lot of news recently about efforts to detect signs of autism in children earlier — even before age 2, which is when doctors typically make the first diagnosis based on toddlers' behavior and development. (Read about these efforts here and here.) Now a new study sheds light on another key issue — why autistic children tend to develop larger brains than those without the condition." 04-11 -05-11-11 Rare Planetary Alignment Now, Not in 2012 (Time.com) "Beginning today and lasting for a few weeks, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Mars will be visible in the early morning sky, aligned roughly along the ecliptic — or the path the sun travels throughout the day. Uranus and Neptune, much fainter but there all the same, should be visible through binoculars. What gives the end-of-the-worlders shivers is that just such a configuration is supposed to occur on Dec. 21, 2012, and contribute in some unspecified way to the demolition of the planet. But what makes that especially nonsensical — apart from the fact that it's, you know, nonsense — is that astronomers say no remotely similar alignment will occur next year." 05-11 -05-23-11 Spider 49 Million Years Old Found in Amber (FoxNews.com) "The latest computer-imaging technology has produce this stunning three-dimensional picture of a spider trapped for 49 million years in an opaque piece of fossilized amber resin." 05-11 -05-26-11 Explosion from Near the Beginning of the Cosmos? (Time.com) "A group of researchers claim they've found the most distant explosion ever detected, a pulse of high energy radiation sent by a disintegrating star near the very edge of the observable universe." "The stellar blast was first spotted by a NASA satellite in April 2009, but researchers announced Wednesday that they have since gathered data placing it more than 13 billion light years away — meaning that the event took place when the universe was still in its infancy." "Not only are gamma ray bursts more powerful than supernovae, they're faster too — typically lasting only a few seconds or minutes." "Charles Meegan, a NASA researcher in gamma ray astronomy, said that a typical burst 'puts out in a few seconds the same energy expended by the sun in its whole 10 billion year life span.' " Editor's Note: Wow. 05-11 -05-27-11 Future Tractor Beam? As in Star Trek? (PC World) "Light emits photons, and when these photos strike an object, they can propel it forward, away from the light source--not a whole lot, mind you, but on a very small scale. Scientists in Hong Kong have recently discovered a way to use a special laser called a Bessel beam to actually pull objects closer to the beam's source." 05-11 -05-27-11 Landmark Experiment Confirms Space-Time Vortex Around the Earth (PC World) "In order to test Einstein’s theory, scientists sent a spinning gyroscope to orbit around the Earth. Space and time are melded together into something like a four-dimensional quilt (don't try making one at home), aptly called space-time. The Earth applies weight to this quilt, causing an indentation 'much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline.' Gravity, then, is the path an object takes following the curve of that indentation." "Einstein theorized that the Earth’s rotation then causes that indentation to twist into a four dimensional swirl. With the axis of the gyroscope’s spin pointed at a fixed object (like a star), the Theory of Relativity indicates that without that swirl (or its 'frame-dragging effect') it would remain that way indefinitely, but with it the axis should drift out of alignment over time. The Gravity Probe B showed that Einstein was right, as the axis did in fact stray." "The experiment resulted in calculations exactly as Einstein predicted. The Gravity Probe B Mission will go down in history as one of the greatest physics experiments of all time. Clifford Will, who chairs an independent panel of the National Research Council tasked with monitoring and reviewing the results of the Gravity Probe B Mission said, 'this will be written up in textbooks as one of the classic experiments in the history of physics.' " 05-11 -05-27-11 Solar Shield to Protect the Power Grid (PC World) "NASA’s plan is a simple one: Solar Shield is a detection system designed to see an ejection from the sun 24-48 hours in advance. Scientists will calculate trajectory and speed of the storm in that time, and when it’s 30 minutes or so from hitting a particular area, they’ll be able to warn the power company to shut down the grid. Without an active current in the grid, no damage will be caused when the storm hits, it’ll just be pretty lights in the sky." 05-11 -05-27-11 Unbelievably Powerful Laser Planned (PC World) "The crown jewel of ELI’s laser research facilities, the highest intensity pillar location of the four, is still being decided upon but they plan to create the world’s most powerful laser there. A 200-petawatt laser to be exact, which is 100,000 times the power of the world electric grid." 05-11 -05-27-11 Virus Improves Solar Cell Efficiency (PC World) "Solar cells are about to get cheaper! Using a genetically modified virus called M13, researchers from MIT were able to make carbon nanotubes self-assemble allowing the solar cells to collect electrons at a more efficient rate. Scientists already know that single-walled carbon nanotubes have a high electron mobility, meaning that electrons can move through them very fast. Using this knowledge, researchers could in theory improve the efficiency of photovoltaic devices (like solar panels) using these nanotubes" 05-11 -06-08-11 Life Found in Very Extreme Conditions (Time.com) "If (relatively) complex life can thrive miles below our feet, it's at least plausible that it lives in similar conditions elsewhere in the cosmos — particularly within Mars, where organisms might have retreated when the environment above grew deadly, just as the Halicephalobus percolated down below after first living on the surface. And that means the search for alien life is a lot more wide open than anyone would have imagined just a few years ago." 06-11 -06-08-11 Two New Elements Added to Periodic Table (Time.com) "Sadly, they don't have names yet, according to the AP. So for now, we'll just have to call them #114 and #116 (numbers which refer to the number of protons in their nuclei and which give them their unique boxes on the table). We know that they last for less than a second, and that "the new elements were made by slamming two lighter elements together in the hopes that they'd stick."" "Elements are sometimes listed before they're voted into the table, as was the case with #114 and #116 before an international committee of scientists gave them the go-ahead, and as is currently the case with #113 and #115, who continue to languish in periodic table purgatory. The total number of officially recognized elements, a Carnegie Mellon professor told the AP, is now 114, given this condition." 06-11 -06-15-11 Scientists Study Murderous Mama Monkeys (Time.com) "For any species hoping to survive in the wild, the lifetime to-do list is agreeably brief: eat, mate, defend your turf and above all, protect your young. It's that last one that seems the most primally encoded, and for good reason: it's hardly possible to pass on your genes if your babies die before they're old enough to have offspring of their own. And yet not only do animals sometimes fail to protect the young of their species, they often kill them themselves." 06-11 -06-26-11 The "Replication Gap" in Science (New York Times) "One of the great strengths of science is that it can fix its own mistakes. 'There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong,' the astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said. 'That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.' ” "If only it were that simple." Actually, the author claims, scientists are typically slow to correct incorrect conclusions through the use of replications. "Why? One simple answer is that it takes a lot of time to look back over other scientists’ work and replicate their experiments. Scientists are busy people, scrambling to get grants and tenure. As a result, papers that attract harsh criticism may nonetheless escape the careful scrutiny required if they are to be refuted." "Even when scientists rerun an experiment, and even when they find that the original result is flawed, they still may have trouble getting their paper published. The reason is surprisingly mundane: journal editors typically prefer to publish groundbreaking new research, not dutiful replications." 06-11 -07-17-11 Spacecraft Orbits Asteroid (Time.com) "The fact is, however, Vesta is the second largest object in our solar system's asteroid belt — and one of the oldest objects in the solar system as a whole — and Dawn is one of the coolest little spacecraft NASA has ever built. Together they could yield important clues to the origins of the sun and the planets, not to mention helping NASA engineers demonstrate their increasingly sophisticated cosmic-flying skills." 07-11 -07-26-11 Time Travel Theory Refuted (Time.com) Ten years ago, it seemed that some scientists proved that photons could travel faster than the speed of light under certain circumstances and this, theoretically, could allow time travel. "But thanks to one particularly determined professor, Du Shengwang, the research team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has proved that particular theory (or, rather, hope) wrong. They say their research, which was published in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that even single photons--the smallest particle of light — travel at the same maximum speed. In other words, time travel will remain in the domain of dreams and science fiction." 07-11 -07-28-11 Black Hole Drinks Trillions of Earth's Worth of Water (Time.com) "We don't think of the universe as a terribly wet place, but in fact there's water out in space pretty much everywhere you look." 07-11 -08-01-11 Earth's Tugboat Astereoid (Time.com) "Now there's word out of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that astronomers have just discovered Earth's first Trojan asteroid — a rock that shares our own solar orbit, leading us around the sun like a tugboat pulling an ocean liner. That's big news not just because such an object had never been spotted before, but also because a Trojan could make such an easy and nifty place for astronauts to visit." 08-11 -08-04-11 Compelling New Evidence for Water on Mars (Time.com) "New images beamed back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006, have produced the first compelling evidence of flowing, salty water on the Martian surface. Water may mean biology — and biology, of course, would mean Martians." 08-11 -08-05-11 Solar Flares Will Cause Disruptions (CNN News) "On Thursday, the sun unleashed a massive solar flare (see video of the flare and how its effects have been moving toward Earth). Solar flares can disrupt radio communications, including devices that use Global Positioning System technology, such as cell phones, airplanes and car navigation systems." "This is one of a series of recent bouts of severe space weather, as the solar cycle approaches solar maximum in 2013. Other major flares came in February and June, and more may follow. A good place to follow solar activity is SpaceWeather.com." 08-11 -08-08-11 Planet of the Humans, Not Apes (CNN News) "The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that there are at most 500,000 great apes left living in the wild—about the population of Fresno. (Great apes include gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos.) We've whittled down the populations of our simian cousins through deforestation—which destroys their habitat—and through hunting, including for meat. Even infectious disease is a major risk—it's thought that 25% of the world's gorilla population has died because of Ebola, a deadly fever that currently poses a much greater threat to apes than it does to us. The nonhuman primates look scary in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but in reality, our closest cousins are in deep trouble. 'The current reality of great ape populations is more of a tragedy than an action thriller,' says Richard Carroll, the head of WWF's Africa program and a gorilla expert. 'If we as humans can't protect our nearest living relatives, then we've failed as a species.' " "Meanwhile, there are nearly 7 billion humans living on every corner of the planet. It wasn't always this way. More than 10,000 years ago, before the development of agriculture, there may well have been more apes than humans—and at the time, we may not have looked like a very good evolutionary bet. Now humans utterly dominate the world, leaving less and less room and resources for wild animals. The hot new term for our current geologic era is the Anthropocene, which reflects the fact that human beings—through carbon emissions, resource use and simple numbers—are now the major force on the planet, capable of changing the genome and the climate alike. It's still a Planet of the Humans—and that's still bad news for the apes." 08-11 -08-12-11 DNA Building Blocks Found in Meteorites (Time.com) "Scientists have been finding evidence of life inside meteorites for well over 100 years — that, or the building blocks of life. The claims of life have been debunked every time, most recently just this past March. It always turns out to be a wishful interpretation of chemicals, minerals and tiny structures inside the meteorite that could be the fossilized husks of long-dead bacteria — but almost certainly aren't." "The building blocks, though, have proved a lot more convincing. As far back as the 1960s, it was clear that amino acids, which link up to form proteins, can and do form in space. And now scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are claiming that another set of molecules crucial to life have also rained down on Earth: adenine and guanine, two of the four so-called nucleobases that, along with cytosine and thymine, form the rungs of DNA's ladder-like structure." 08-11 -08-18-11 The Blackest Planet in the Universe (Time.com) "If you imagine the blackest thing you've ever heard of — a lump of coal, say — and then try to imagine something a whole lot blacker, you're beginning to get a sense of the planet known by the strange name of TrES-2b. Whereas the original Jupiter reflects about 50% of the sunlight that hits it, TrES-2b reflects an infinitesimal 1%. 'Actually,' says David Spiegel, a Princeton astronomer who co-authored the new study on TrES-2b's remarkable blackness that appears in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 'our best models suggest it's more like a 10th of a percent.' ” Also try Extrasolar Planets. 08-11 -09-10-10 Hawking: The Nature of Reality (Time.com) "Though realism may be a tempting viewpoint, what we know about modern physics makes it a difficult one to defend. For example, according to the principles of quantum physics, which is an accurate description of nature, a particle has neither a definite position nor a definite velocity unless and until those quantities are measured by an observer. In fact, in some cases individual objects don't even have an independent existence but rather exist only as part of an ensemble of many." 09-10 -09-14-10 Black Hole Creates Its Own Galaxy (Wired.com) “Astronomers have spied a distant black hole in the act of creating the galaxy that will eventually become its home." 07-10 -10-04-10 Largest Survey of Ocean Life Is Completed (Wall Street Journal) "The census is part of a wider push by scientists to create free, online digital libraries of biological data about life on earth. The marine data, for example, will feed into the Encyclopedia of Life project, an effort to document all 1.8 million named species on earth. There's also an International Barcode of Life project assembling DNA barcodes for all multi-cellular organisms." "Scientists intend to use such digital libraries to study biodiversity on a planet-wide level, just as different types of meteorological data are pooled and used to predict weather. Spurring the efforts is a new field known as biodiversity informatics, which uses sophisticated computer techniques to sift and analyze data in novel ways." "Since it began, data from the marine census has yielded some 2,700 scientific papers. One significant study published July, in the journal Nature, found a strong link between rising sea temperatures and the decline of marine algae, the basis of the oceans' food chain. Another census-based study in Nature found that warmer seas can hurt marine diversity, potentially rearranging the global distribution of ocean life." 10-10 -10-06-10 Embryonic Stem Cell Research in the U.S. in Question (New York Times) "Perhaps more than any other field of science, the study of embryonic stem cells has been subject to ethical objections and shaped by political opinion. But only a year after the Obama administration lifted some of the limits imposed by President George W. Bush, a lawsuit challenging the use of public money for the research and a conservative shift in Congress could leave the field more sharply restricted than it has been since its inception a decade ago." 10-10 -10-06-10 Pair Win Nobel Prize for Investigating Graphene (New York Times) "A pair of Russian-born physicists working at the University of Manchester in England have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for investigating the remarkable properties of ultrathin carbon flakes known as graphene, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Tuesday." "Graphene is a form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a flat hexagon lattice like microscopic chicken wire, a single atom thick. It is not only the thinnest material in the world, but also one of the strongest and hardest." "Among its other properties, graphene is able to conduct electricity as well as copper does and to conduct heat better than any other known material, and it is practically transparent. Physicists say that it could eventually rival silicon as a basis for computer chips, serve as a sensitive pollution-monitoring material, improve flat-screen televisions, and enable the creation of new materials and novel tests of quantum weirdness." 10-10 -10-06-10 What Is Killing Bees (CBS News) "CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports in each of the past four years about one-third of America's 2.5 million honeybee colonies have been wiped out. University of Montana researcher Jerry Bromenshenk has been searching for the killer. After screening bees for 30,000 disease markers a group of scientists led by Bromenshenk say they have found a probable cause." "The kind of virus they discovered is common in other insects but very rarely seen in bees. The virus seems to kill only when the bees are also infected with a parasite, a type of fungus." "Bromenshenk said, 'It looks like is that the bees can tolerate either one alone.' But, 'When you combine the two - that tends to become lethal in a hurry.' " "That combination may help beekeepers. While there is no way to treat the unusual, new virus, the parasite can be killed by a fungicide. Bromenshenk said beekeepers can 'buy those treatments and apply them.' " "As the main pollinator for most fruits and vegetables, honeybees play a vital role in producing about 30 percent of our food. So it's important to all of us that scientists are now closing in on both the cause and the cure of the honeybee die-off." 10-10 -10-12-10 First Embryonic Stem Cell Treatment Tried (CBS News) "A California bio-tech company has begun testing an embryonic stem-cell drug treatment on a patient with spinal cord injuries, marking the first time a drug made with embryonic stem cells has been used on a human." 10-10 -11-07-11 Invisibility Thread Invented (MSNBC News) "It no longer belongs to the wizarding world of Harry Potter: A scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas has created his own invisibility cloak." "His 'cloak' right now is small -- several strands of what look like thread." 11-11 -11-22-11 The Search for Life on Other Planets (CNN News) "So what it comes down to is this: While there may be other life out there, the reality is that the universe is such a big place, we’re not going for a visit to our celestial neighbors anytime soon." 11-11 -12-05-11 Largest Black Holes Yet Found (CNN News) "Black holes: They're the most destructive monsters in the universe. We already knew they can be powerfully massive. Now scientists say they've found the most massive ones yet, as reported in the journal Nature." 12-11 -12-09-11 Largest Black Holes Yet Found (Time.com) "The smaller one, located inside a galaxy known as NGC 3842, is as massive as 9.7 billion suns, and the other, in a galaxy called NGC 4889, is more than twice as large: if you put it on a very large balance, it would take at least 21 billion stars to even things out. Another way to think about things: even the smaller of the two is nearly 30% bigger than the previous record holder, announced last winter, and it would make for a great storyline if astronomers were surprised, amazed, flabbergasted, blown away by the awesome giganticness of these monsters." "Nowadays, everyone pretty much agrees that quasars are supermassive black holes at the cores of young galaxies. The holes themselves aren't visible, of course, but when they suck in surrounding matter, the stuff heats up to millions of degrees, sending bursts of energy shooting across the cosmos." "Back when the universe was young, there was plenty of gas floating around to feed these monsters. Nowadays, much of it the gas is gone, and so are the quasars — but the black holes that powered them should, as Loeb says, still be around (where would they go, after all?)." 12-11 -12-13-11 Movement of Light Captured at MIT (Time.com) "Our feeble little minds can’t process the time that light takes to fill a room, but now we can see it happen in slow-motion with help from the MIT Media Lab and its trillion frames per second camera." 11-12 -12-13-11 The Search for the "God Particle" Narrows (Time.com) "The existence of mass — the property of matter that gives gravity something to pull on — needs explaining." "Now, say two independent teams of scientists who revealed their results at a symposium in Switzerland Tuesday morning, there are experimental signs of an elusive particle formally known as the Higgs boson — and informally known as the 'God particle.' If the Higgs is really there, the existence of mass has finally been explained, and a Scottish physicist named Peter Higgs is a lock for the Nobel prize." "Suffice it to say that there's a sort of energy field that pervades the universe, and that when particles like protons, neutrons, quarks and the rest interact with the Higgs field, they're rewarded with mass. The Higgs boson helps broker the transaction." 12-11 -12-14-11 First-Ever Close-Up of Matter Falling into a Supermassive Black Hole (Christian Science Monitor) "For the first time, astronomers are poised to get a close look at a supermassive black hole making a meal of in-falling gas." 12-11 -12-15-11 New: Big Climate Change Could Be Soon (TG Daily.com) "New research from NASA into the Earth's paleoclimate history indicates we could be facing rapid climate change this century, including sea level rises of many meters." According to Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James E Hansen, 'The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to two degrees is not sufficient,' he says. 'It would be a prescription for disaster.' " 12-11 -12-21-11 Two Earth-Sized Planets Discovered (Wall Street Journal) "Using NASA's Kepler space telescope, astronomers discovered two Earth-size planets orbiting a distant star--the smallest of all the thousands of alien worlds detected so far, Lee Hotz reports on the News Hub. Photo: NASA." 12-11 -12-31-11 A First-Ever Malaria Vaccine (Time.com) "A first-ever malaria vaccine tested in children in sub-Saharan Africa cut the risk of infection with malaria by about half — a remarkable achievement, considering there has never been a vaccine against a human parasite before, or against malaria, which infects millions of children each year." 12-11 -12-31-11 HIV Treatment As Prevention (Time.com) "The treatment of HIV has come a long way, thanks to antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that can lower levels of the virus in the body, keeping people healthy and reducing the risk of HIV transmission. Increasingly, though, studies have also shown that the same drugs used to treat existing infections can also help protect HIV-free people from becoming infected." 12-11 -12-31-11 Scientists Use Cloning to Create Stem Cells (Time.com) "It's not quite human cloning, but it's close. Researchers reported using a variation of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) — the same technique that created Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned, from a skin cell of a ewe — on human cells. SCNT involves replacing the genetic material of an egg cell with the DNA from a mature cell (a skin cell, for example). The egg is then stimulated to divide, and if it develops fully, produces a genetically identical clone of the animal from which the mature cell was taken." 12-11 01-25-11 Scientists Identify Gene for Spread of Cancer (CBS News) "Scientists in England say they have identified the gene that is responsible for cancer's spread through the body - raising the possibility of a 'one-size-fits-all' cure for the disease by developing a drug that switches off the gene.Most deaths from cancer result from its gradual metastasis, or spreading, from the original cancer site to other tissues and organs." 01-11 09-30-10 Scientists: Planet Like Earth Found (CNN News) "A team of astronomers from the University of California and the Carnegie Institute of Washington say they've found a planet like ours, 20 light years (120 trillion miles) from Earth, where the basic conditions for life are good." 09-10 10-04-10 Largest Survey of Ocean Life Is Completed (CNN News) "The planet's seas and oceans are richer and more diverse than scientists suspected, the biggest survey of marine life has revealed -- but many mysteries remain." "The Census of Marine Life, which announced its full findings Monday, has taken 10 years to complete, employing 2,700 scientists from 80 nations. The $650 million study surveyed from the coldest waters to the warmest lagoons, from the smallest microbes to the largest cetaceans." "It even looked at life 10,000 meters (6.2 miles) down in the Marianas Trench southeast of Japan." 10-10 10-20-10 Most Distant (Known) Galaxy (MSNBC News) "Astronomers have confirmed that an incredibly faint galaxy in the constellation Fornax is the most distant known object in the universe, shining more than 13 billion light-years away and reflecting an era when stars were just beginning to emerge from a cosmic fog." 10-10 Breaking News in Astronomy (SpaceFlightNow.com) Provides news key news stories. News on Missions to Mars (NASA - Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Provides news on missions to Mars, including two unmanned rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landing in January 2004. Science News (Awesome Library) Provides news and articles by discipline in science. Science News (BBC News) Provides news stories daily. Science News (Nature.com) Provides refereed articles. Science News (ScienceDaily.com) Provides current events in science and technology. Skin Printer Under Development to Treat Burns (CNN News) "Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine were inspired by standard inkjet printers found in many home offices." 10-10 Space Station and Shuttle (NASA Human Spaceflight - Dismukes and Humphries) Provides news on events surrounding space stations and shuttles. 2-01 Technology News (News.com.com) Provides news on technology. Papers -07-20-09 Up to $23.7 Trillion to Fix Financial System? (ABC News) ""The total potential federal government support could reach up to $23.7 trillion," says Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in a new report obtained Monday by ABC News on the government's efforts to fix the financial system." "Granted, Barofsky is not saying that the government will definitely spend that much money. He is saying that potentially, it could." 07-09 -10-21-10 Moon Has Vast Amounts of Water (ABC News) Analysis of results of a study shows that the moon has billions of gallons of water, enough to set up a colony there. 10-10 -A Key to Life on Other Planets? (Time.com) "What a team of scientists actually found, as described in a paper in Science, is what may be the oddest bacteria on Earth. These microbes live in hellish conditions in Mono Lake, a super-salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water in eastern California that would be toxic to most organisms. But the new bug doesn't just thrive here: it uses arsenic in place of the standard phosphorus as a building block for its internal proteins and even its DNA — and nothing like that has ever been seen before." "It's never been shown that other kinds of life are impossible, though. For decades, for example, biologists have wondered if silicon could take the place of carbon, the basis of all life on Earth, in forming self-reproducing, information-carrying molecules like DNA." 12-10 -A New Planet Found Beyond the Galaxy (Time.com) "HIP 13044, as it's unglamorously known, has a planet whirling around it — the first planet ever found from outside the Milky Way. Aside from its extra-galactic origin, the planet itself, found with a medium-size telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and described in a new paper in Science, isn't especially remarkable." 11-10 -Complicated Animal Societies Challenge our Views (BBC News) "Blinded by the limits of our own imagination, historically we have found it difficult to envisage another entity [ocean mammals] with capabilities that rival our own." "Acknowledging that at least some animals are 'beyond use' brings forward implications spanning philosophy, law, science and policy." 12-10 -Direct Conversion of Stem Cells (CBS News) "The new direct-conversion approach avoids embryonic stem cells and the whole notion of returning to an early state. Why not just go directly from one specialized cell to another? (It's like flying direct rather than scheduling a stopover.)" The direct-conversion of stem cells has resulted in "scientists converting mouse skin cells into nerve cells and heart muscle cells. And just this month came success with human cells, turning skin cells into early stage blood cells." 11-10 -Simulation Results: Temperature Rise Caused a Mass Extinction (BBC News) "A computer simulation of the Earth's climate 250 million years ago suggests that global warming triggered the so-called 'great dying'." "A dramatic rise in carbon dioxide caused temperatures to soar to 10 to 30 degrees Celsius higher than today, say US researchers." "Some 95% of lifeforms in the oceans became extinct, along with about three-quarters of land species." 8-05 -Study: Social Animals Have Grown Larger Brains (ScienceDaily.com) "Co-author and Director of ICEA Professor Robin Dunbar said: 'For the first time, it has been possible to provide a genuine evolutionary time depth to the study of brain evolution. It is interesting to see that even animals that have contact with humans, like cats, have much smaller brains than dogs and horses because of their lack of sociality.' " 11-10 A Home on the Moon? (CNN News) "Building a home near a moon crater or a lunar sea may sound nice, but moon colonists might have a much better chance of survival if they just lived in a hole." "That's the message sent by an international team of scientists who say they've discovered a protected lunar 'lava tube' -- a deep, giant hole -- that might be well suited for a moon colony or a lunar base." "The vertical hole, in the volcanic Marius Hills region on the moon's near side, is 213 feet wide and is estimated to be more than 260 feet deep, according to findings published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.More important, the scientists say, the hole is protected from the moon's harsh temperatures and meteorite strikes by a thin sheet of lava. That makes the tube a good candidate for further exploration or possible inhabitation, the article says." 01-10 Andromeda Galaxy Way Bigger Than Thought (CNN News) "The discovery of several large, metal-poor stars located far from the center of the Andromeda galaxy suggests our nearest galactic neighbor might be up to five times larger than previously thought." " 'We're typically used to thinking of Andromeda as this tiny speck of light, but the actual size of the halo...extends to a very large radius and it actually fills a substantial portion of the night sky,' said study team member Jason Kalirai of the University of California, Santa Cruz." 01-07 Animals Use Tools (CNN News) "For centuries, philosophers claimed that the ability to make tools separated man from beast." "But in 1960, a young wildlife researcher named Jane Goodall told her boss,anthropologist Louis Leakey, that she'd witnessed chimpanzees stripping leaves from twigs and using them to 'fish' for termites." "A stunned Leakey responded,'Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.' Of course, we now know that chimps were only the beginning." 04-10 Ants Rule (LiveScience.com) "Scientists estimate that about 20,000 ant species crawl the Earth. Taxonomists have classified more than 11,000 species, which account for at least one-third of all insect biomass. The combined heft of ants in the Brazilian Amazon is about four times greater than the combined mass of all of the mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, according to one survey." 01-07 Archbishop Tutu's Genome Examined (Time.com) "Archbishop Desmond Tutu dedicated his life to the promotion of equality. Now a new study of his genetic makeup has helped scientists understand how different human beings are — at least genetically." " 'It is exciting that science is finding evidence of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals, and this discovery should be embraced, not feared,' he said. 'It would be disastrous if scientists were to ignore the diversity of the human race because this is the greatest asset of humanity.' " 02-10 Astronomers Capture First Images of New Planets (CNN News) "The first-ever pictures of planets outside our solar system were released today in two studies." "According to the the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, there have been 322 planets found outside our solar system. The latest findings bring that total to 326." 11-08 Astronomers Find Most Distant Object (CBS News) "Astronomers have spotted a burst of energy from a dying star, setting a record for the oldest and most distant object seen by Earth yet." 04-09 Blind Boy Learns to "See" With His Ears (CNN News) "To 'see' the world around him, he clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth and listens to the echo that bounces back. From the sound, he can make out the location, depth and shape of objects around him, allowing him to navigate even unfamiliar areas." 10-09 Breakthrough Findings of New Worlds (Time.com) "On Tuesday, a team of stargazers using the European Southern Observatory in the high Chilean desert announced they'd detected a system of at least five, and maybe as many as seven, planets circling a star known as HD 10180, about 127 light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Hydrus. And just two days later, a paper appeared in Science trumpeting the discovery of a multiplanetary system circling a star called Kepler-9, 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. The latter solar system has only two or three worlds — but the space telescope that found it is so powerful that this discovery is just a hint of the other worlds and other solar systems it may discover in the next few months." "Both detections are scientific tours de force in different ways. In the first, scientists found the planets indirectly, by noting how HD 10180 is being tugged back and forth by a swarm of circling planets. That's how the first extrasolar planets were found in the mid-1990s, but the effect is so subtle that doing a clear analysis of the mass and orbit of even a single planet is tough. Untangling multiple, independent, overlapping sets of wobbles is excruciatingly hard." 08-10 DNA Kits Available to Learn Our Own Ancestry (PBS.org) "With advances in DNA technology, researchers are learning more about the origins and diversity of humans, allowing companies to offer DNA test kits and analysis for people who want to learn more about their ancestry." 07-07 Distant Planet Viewed Directly (Time.com) "In an upcoming paper in the Astrophysical Journal, three observers confirm that they've photographed a planet orbiting a sun-like star known as 1RXS 1609, about 500 light-years, or nearly three quadrillion miles, from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius." 07-10 Distant Planet-Like Object Viewed Directly, a First (Time.com) "Astronomers have been finding planets around distant stars for more than a decade now, and the count is currently around 400. But the vast majority of these so-called exoplanets have been seen indirectly — by their gravitational effects or by the dimming caused when they pass in front of their parent stars. To really understand what a planet is like in detail, you have to see it directly, and that's incredibly hard to do with today's technology." "But an international team has done it." 12-09 Editorial: One Giant Leap to Nowhere (New York Times) "NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone [after reaching the moon] from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun." "It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of." 07-09 Editorial: The Absurd Divide Between Pure and Applied Research (New York Timesr) "These transcendent figures in the history of science flourished by moving back and forth between pure and applied problems. In today’s more specialized world, there are numerous artificial divisions between pure and applied work: different departments, different professional societies, and different journals. The stereotyped view is that the applied scientists control the lion’s share of funding, while the basic scientists control the most prestigious journals and prizes. The reality is more complicated and lies somewhere in between." "What remains true is that practical problems can be equally compelling as fundamental ones, and often lead in turn to the discovery of new fundamental science. In particular, there is an intimate connection between the invention of new technology and its application to scientific discovery." 02-09 Efforts to Treat Diseases from Genome Research Results Are Frustrated (New York Times) "As more people have their entire genomes decoded, the roots of genetic disease may eventually be understood, but at this point there is no guarantee that treatments will follow. If each common disease is caused by a host of rare genetic variants, it may not be susceptible to drugs." 06-10 Evolution of the Universe (NASA) "The myriad galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field represented the first big step for Hubble astronomers to understand galaxy evolution. But studying galaxy evolution in the Hubble Deep Field is like trying to understand the population of a country by sampling a small village. Astronomers don't know if the galaxies in that village are representative of the universe's galactic population. The GOODS survey, on the other hand, is akin to sampling the population of a large city to make inferences about galaxies in the cosmos." 6-03 Extinction 200 Million Years Ago (CNN) Describes a very rapid mass extinction of life on earth 200 million years ago. 5-01 Genes of 4,000-Year-Old Man Decoded (New York Times) "The genome of a man who lived on the western coast of Greenland some 4,000 years ago has been decoded, thanks to the surprisingly good preservation of DNA in a swatch of his hair so thick it was originally thought to be from a bear." "This is the first time the whole genome of an ancient human has been analyzed, and it joins the list of just eight whole genomes of living people that have been decoded so far." 05-09 Hawking Is Wrong: Finding Extraterrestrial Life Is Not Dangerous (Discovery.com) "I’ve mulled over these warnings and have converged on what I think are some simple truths, from a purely astronomical perspective. The bottom line is that I'm not losing any sleep worrying about awaking one morning to see an alien mothership hovering over Washington D.C." 05-10 Hawking: Finding Extraterrestrial Life May Be Dangerous (CBS News) "If E.T. phones, hang up." "That's the implication from British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who said that while extraterrestrial life almost certainly exists, it could be dangerous for humans to interact with them." 04-10 Hobbit-Sized Ancient Humans Found (ABC News) "Subsequent finds of other similarly sized, 3-foot-tall humans with brains the size of grapefruits in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores suggest these 18,000-year-old specimens weren't a quirk of an ancient hominin, but part of an entire species of miniature people whose existence overlapped with that of modern Homo sapiens." "Brown and the other authors suggest that the newly found species, named Homo floresiensis, arrived on the island of Flores, in Indonesia's Nusa Tenggara region, in the form of Homo erectus, the first large-brained hominin that emerged some 2 million years ago in Africa and Asia." 10-04 Hubble Shows that the Universe's Expansion Is Speeding Up (Telegraph.co.uk) "The expansion of the Universe is speeding up – proving once again that Einstein's theory of relativity is correct - according to astronomers who studied hundreds of thousands of galaxies." 04-10 Hubble Survey Finds Missing Matter (HubbleSite.org) "Although the universe contains billions of galaxies, only a small amount of its matter is locked up in these behemoths. Most of the universe's matter that was created during and just after the Big Bang must be found elsewhere." "Now, in an extensive search of the local universe, astronomers say they have definitively found about half of the missing normal matter, called baryons, in the spaces between the galaxies. This important component of the universe is known as the 'intergalactic medium,' or IGM, and it extends essentially throughout all of space, from just outside our Milky Way galaxy to the most distant regions of space observed by astronomers." "Astronomers caution that the missing baryonic matter is not to be confused with 'dark matter,' a mysterious and exotic form of matter that is only detected via its gravitational pull." 06-08 Importance of Water on the Moon (CNN News) "An announcement in November probably rivaled Neil Armstrong's first steps on the surface more than 40 years earlier: There's water on the moon." "The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or L-CROSS, and its companion spacecraft crashed into a crater at the moon's south pole in October and discovered water in a very dark and very cold place. L-CROSS researchers said about 25 gallons of water were detected in the crater, which measured about 60 feet wide by a few feet deep." " 'We used to think of the moon as this really dead and unchanging place, that the moon was a dead planet. ... There are changes that occur there not over the course of thousands or millions or even billions of years, but are changing over the course of days and weeks and months. That's something people just hadn't thought of until just weeks and months ago. ... This isn't your grandfather's moon anymore.' " 12-09 Important Transitional Fossil Found (Time.com) "The fossil is so perfectly preserved because Ida probably died quickly and nonviolently; her resting place was an abandoned quarry called the Messel Pit, near Frankfurt." "The second reason the discovery is so important is its age. Ida — her scientific name is Darwinius masillae — dates to about 47 million years ago, when temperatures were warmer than they are today and when mammals underwent a burst of evolutionary diversification. In particular, that's when primates began splitting off into two branches. One became anthropoids, whose descendants are monkeys, apes and humans. The other turned into prosimians — lemurs and their kin." "Ida is intriguing because she has some characteristics of both branches, which suggests that she could be a transitional animal that gave rise to the anthropoids and, ultimately, to us." 05-09 India Discovers Water on the Moon (ABC News) "India's newspapers are filled with headlines about its first lunar mission's Chandrayan-1 discovering water on the moon." 09-09 Key Link in Human Evolution? (Time.com) "Evolution skeptics like to trot out the argument that if Darwin had been right, scientists would have discovered transitional fossils by now — creatures with a mix of features from earlier and later species. Since they haven't, the deniers say, evolution must not be true." "The truth is that paleontologists have found transitional species by the score, from many different time periods. But none have materialized from as crucial a point in our evolutionary past as a pair of skeletons whose discovery was announced today by the journal Science" "The fossils, which have been determined to be a new species, Australopithecus sediba, were initially found by Matthew Berger, the 9-year-old son of paleontologist Lee Berger of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand (the elder Berger tried in vain to get the editors of Science to list Matthew as a co-author on the paper). The bones belong to a pre-teenage boy and a woman estimated to be in her late 20s or early 30s; the individuals died at about the same time, and before their remains had fully decomposed, they were entombed in an avalanche of sediment and nearly perfectly preserved deep in the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa." 04-10 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Completed (Time.com) "Scientists believe the LHC's results will help fill in gaps in the Standard Model, the far-reaching set of equations on the interaction of subatomic particles that is the closest that modern physics comes to a testable 'theory of everything.' For example, scientists believe the LHC will produce a particle, the Higgs Boson, that will end debate over how matter in the universe acquires mass. Or, it could even provide evidence for more ambitious theories of the universe, such as string theory, which unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, the previously known laws of the small and large that are currently incompatible in the Standard Model." 09-08 Living to 1000? (Time.com) "TIME's three-day forum on the Future of Life ended on a note of extravagant promises about a coming century of startling advances — in personalized medicine, including life spans well beyond 100 years, increasingly smart computer programs that will emulate biological processes, new genetically engineered sources of energy and outreaches into space that will take both humans and robots far from their home planet." 02-10 Longest Solar Eclipse of the Century (MSNBC News) "Hordes of scientists, students and nature enthusiasts prepared Tuesday for the longest total solar eclipse of this century, while millions planned to shutter themselves indoors, giving in to superstitious myths about the phenomenon." "Wednesday's eclipse will first be sighted at dawn in India's Gulf of Khambhat, just north of the metropolis of Mumbai, before being seen in a broad swath moving north and east to Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and China." 07-09 Measuring the Universe (MSNBC News) "How far away is that galaxy? The more precise your answer is, the more you can find out about mysterious dark energy. In the past, astronomers have used variable stars and a special kind of supernova to make their distance estimates - and now two new measuring sticks are being added to the toolbox." 06-09 Memories Have "Plasticity" (ScienceDaily.com) "Dissecting the mechanisms behind emotional memory is important because the region of the brain that governs this also controls fear and anxiety. That is why an emotional memory, such as a traumatic car accident, can activate the autonomic nervous system, causing bodily responses like an increase in heart rate, sweating and blood pressure -- even if you don't realize it." 01-07 Moon or Mars? (CNN News) "When humans are ready to go, the agency envisions seven-day missions at first, followed by 180-day stays once a lunar outpost is in place." " 'We're not doing flags and footsteps,' Olson said. 'We're going for a long-term sustained human presence that's affordable and safe and built so that we can use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars and near-Earth asteroids and other exciting locations in the solar system.' " "A potential manned mission to the Red Planet wouldn't take place until at least 2030, Olson added." "Is it the right way to go? Critics say NASA should skip the moon and set its sights directly on Mars." 07-09 Music Training May Increase Memory in Children (CBS News) "Researchers have found that not only did the brains of young, musically trained children respond differently to hearing music, but musical training also appeared to improve the children's memories over the course of a year." 09-06 Neanderthal DNA Genes Decoded (MSNBC News) "Humans and their close Neanderthal relatives began diverging from a common ancestor about 700,000 years ago, and the two groups split permanently some 300,000 years later, according to two of the most detailed analyses of Neanderthal DNA to date." "In popular imagination, Neanderthals are often portrayed as prehistoric brutes who became outsmarted by a more advanced species, humans, emerging from Africa. But excavations and anatomical studies have shown that Neanderthals used tools, wore jewelry, buried their dead, cared for their sick, and possibly sang or even spoke in much the same way that we do. Even more humbling, perhaps, their brains were slightly larger than ours." 11-06 New Clues in Mass Death of Bees (Time.com) "In late 2006, something strange began to happen to America's honeybees. Colonies that were once thriving suddenly went still, almost overnight. The worker bees that make hives run simply disappeared, their bodies never to be found. Over the past couple of years, nearly one-third of all honeybee colonies have collapsed this way, which led to a straightforward name for the phenomenon: colony collapse disorder (CCD)." New Group of Ancient Humans Discovered (BBC News) "Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with our own species." "The ancient humans have been dubbed Denisovans after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found." 12-10 Oldest Animal Discovered (BBC News) "A clam dredged up off the coast of Iceland is thought to have been the longest-lived animal discovered." "Scientists said the mollusc, an ocean quahog clam, was aged between 405 and 410 years and could offer insights into the secrets of longevity." 10-07 Only 10% of Life on Earth Discovered (MSNBC News) "“We’ve only touched the surface of understanding animal life,” said entomologist Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences. 'We’ve discovered just 10 percent of all living things on this planet.' " 08-07 Our Galaxy Is Rich in Earth-Sized Planets (CNN News) "Since the time of Nicolaus Copernicus five centuries ago, people have wondered whether there are other planets like Earth in the universe. Today scientists are closer than ever to an answer -- and it appears to be that the Milky Way galaxy is rich in Earth-sized planets, according to astronomer Dimitar Sasselov." 08-10 Science: How Did Life Begin? (Time.com) "The molecule was not alive, at least not in any conventional sense. Yet its behavior was astonishingly lifelike. When it appeared last April at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, scientists thought it had spoiled their experiment. But this snippet of synthetic rna -- one of the master molecules in the nuclei of all cells -- proved unusually talented. Within an hour of its formation, it had commandeered the organic material in a thimble-size test tube and started to make copies of itself. Then the copies made copies. Before long, the copies began to evolve, developing the ability to perform new and unexpected chemical tricks. Surprised and excited, the scientists who witnessed the event found themselves wondering, Is this how life got started?" 06-10 Scientists Create First Artificial Genome (ABC News) "It may not quite be 'Frankenstein,' but for the first time scientists have created an organism controlled by completely manmade DNA." "Using the tools of synthetic biology, scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute installed a completely artificial genome inside a host cell without DNA. Like the bolt of lightening that awakened Frankenstein, the new genome invigorated the host cell, which began to grow and reproduce, albeit with a few problems." 05-10 Scientists: The Moon Has Significant Water (USA Today) " 'There's water, and it is not just a little water, but significant amounts,' says NASA's Anthony Colaprete, chief science investigator for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS)." 11-09 Stunning New Close-Ups of Mars (CNN News) "What would you see if you could fly over Mars in a plane and look out the window?" "It must be something like the thousands of curious, intriguing and spectacular images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera mounted on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter." 09-09 Super-Smasher Targets Mysteries of the Universe (MSNBC News) "It will take months for the machine to reach full power. But eventually, those protons will be whipped up to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, slamming together with the energy of two bullet trains colliding head-on. Underground detectors as big as cathedrals will track the subatomic wreckage on a time scale of billionths of a second. Billions of bits of data will be sent out every second for analysis." "As big as the numbers surrounding the LHC are, the mysteries it was built to address are bigger:" "What was the newborn universe made of?" "What causes things to have mass?" "Why is most of that mass hidden?" "Where did all the antimatter go?" "Is our entire universe a mere sliver of all that is?" 09-08 Survival of the Weakest: Why Neanderthals Went Extinct (Newsweek.com) "Because Neanderthals were not adept at tracking herds on the tundra, they had to retreat with the receding woodlands. They made their last stand where pockets of woodland survived, including in a cave in the Rock of Gibraltar. There, Finlayson and colleagues discovered in 2005, Neanderthals held on at least 2,000 years later than anywhere else before going extinct, victims of bad luck more than any evolutionary failings, let alone any inherent superiority of their successors." 07-09 The Best Preserved Dinosaur Mummy (Discovery.com) Leonardo, a duckbilled Brachylophosaurus dinosaur, is the most complete fossil of a dinosaur found. 12-09 Water Found on Mars (MSNBC News) "The Phoenix spacecraft has tasted Martian water for the first time, scientists reported Thursday." 07-08 Where Humans Are Headed Genetically (U.S. News) "Hawks is among a growing number of scientists who are using whole-genome sequencing and other modern technologies to zero in on just how we've changed. Their research is helping illuminate not only how humans became what we are but also where we might be headed." 07-08 World's Fastest Animal (MSNBC News) "The giant palm salamander of Central America shoots out its tongue with more instantaneous power than any known muscle in the animal kingdom, a new study finds." "Bolitoglossa can extend its tongue more than half its body length in about 7 milliseconds, or about 50 times faster than an average eye blink." "The findings revealed the tongues were propelled outward much faster than could be achieved by muscle contraction alone." 03-07

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