Researchers writing in Current Biology say they may have determined what makes musical notes sound good (or bad) by studying the preferences of more than 250 college students from Minnesota to a variety of musical and nonmusical sounds.

WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived. The planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured. The discovery has been documented in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

WASP-12 is a yellow dwarf star located approximately 600 light-years away in the winter constellation Auriga. The exoplanet was discovered by the United Kingdom's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) in 2008. The automated survey looks for the periodic dimming of stars from planets passing in front of them, an effect called transiting.

Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome which may allow them to probe the basic machinery of life and engineer bacteria specially designed to solve environmental or energy problems.

The research team, led by Craig Venter, has already chemically synthesized a bacterial genome, and transplanted the genome of one bacterium to another. Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a "synthetic cell," although only its genome is synthetic.

Albert Einstein said scientists would never be able to observe the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles as they randomly shake and shimmy, so called Brownian motion, but physicist at the University of Texas say they have done so.

In 1907, Einstein likely did not foresee a time when dust-sized particles of glass could be trapped and suspended in air by dual laser beam "optical tweezers." Nor would he have known that ultrasonic vibrations from a plate-like transducer would shake those glass beads into the air to be tweezed and measured as they moved in suspension.

Spices commonly used to season cooked ground beef may also reduce the risk of consuming compounds called heterocyclic amines (HCAs) that can cause cancer .

HCAs are the carcinogenic compounds that are produced when muscle foods, such as ground beef patties, are barbecued, grilled, boiled or fried. Consuming HCAs through meat increases risk factors for colorectal, stomach, lung, pancreatic, mammary and prostate cancers.

J. Scott Smith, a Kansas State University food chemistry professor, found that certain spices containing natural antioxidants would reduce HCA levels by 40 percent when applied to beef patties during cooking.

The widely held notion that warming global temperatures will lead to a future intensification of malaria and an expansion of its global range is at odds with the available evidence, according to a new study in Nature.

The research, conducted by the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP), suggests that current interventions could have a far more dramatic – and positive – effect on reducing the spread of malaria than any negative effects caused by climate change.

A steady stream of modeling studies have predicted that malaria will worsen and its range will spread as the world gets warmer.