The U.S. won't change the predominately white-male face of its science and technology workforce until higher education addresses the attitudes, behaviors and structural practices that undermine minority students' access and success at college, a new study suggests.

Hot vents on the seabed could have spontaneously produced the organic molecules necessary for life, according to a model which shows how the surfaces of mineral particles inside hydrothermal vents have similar chemical properties to enzymes, the biological molecules that govern chemical reactions in living organisms.

This means that vents are able to create simple carbon-based molecules, such as methanol and formic acid, out of the dissolved CO2 in the water. This would explain how some of the key building blocks for organic chemistry were already being formed in nature before life emerged - and may have played a role in the emergence of the first life forms.

A team of researchers have found 38 genes and molecules that most likely cause HER2+ cancer cells to spread.

The HER2+ subtype accounts for 20 to 30 percent of early-stage breast cancer diagnoses, which are around 200,000 new diagnoses each year in the United States, leading to approximately 40,000 deaths annually. Several cancer chemotherapy drugs do work well at early stages of the disease, destroying 95 to 98 percent of the cancer cells in HER2+ tumors, but patients can develop resistance and the tumors begin to grow again. 

Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand now have birth rates that are relatively close to replacement, which means that the 'decline of the West', where developed nations birth control and abort themselves out of existence, isn't happening.

It's certainly a more optimistic demographic narrative of the future of the West than we usually get, where declining birth rates and population aging will reduce Europe and the US while Asian superpowers, such as China and India, see huge populations and economies to match. 

The ocean sucks up heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) building up in our atmosphere with help from tiny plankton.

Like plants on land, plankton convert CO2 into organic carbon via photosynthesis and then can sink into the deep ocean, carrying carbon with them. They decompose when bacteria convert their remains back into CO2.

This "biological pump," if it operated 100 percent efficiently, would mean nearly every atom of carbon drawn into the ocean would be converted to organic carbon, sink into the deep ocean, and remain sequestered from the atmosphere for millennia. But like hail stones that melt before reaching the ground, some carbon never makes it to the deep ocean, allowing CO2 to leak back into the upper ocean and ultimately exchange with the atmosphere.

The first three eggs of the rare ‘Akeke‘e have hatched under the auspices of San Diego Zoo Global conservation biologists. The newly hatched chicks represent hope for the survival of a small Hawaiian honeycreeper.

Eggs from two species of rare Hawaiian honeycreeper birds, the ‘Akikiki and ‘Akeke‘e, were collected from native habitat earlier this month as part of an effort to preserve these two bird species from extinction.