Sandcastle worms live in intertidal surf, building sturdy tube-shaped homes from bits of sand and shell and their own natural glue. University of Utah bioengineers have made a synthetic version of this seaworthy superglue, and hope it will be used within several years to repair shattered bones in knees, other joints and the face.

"You would glue some of the small pieces together," says Russell Stewart, associate professor of bioengineering and senior author of the study to be published online within a week in the journal Macromolecular Biosciences.

The next time you have to make a difficult moral decision, you might think twice about mulling it over in the bath or shower.   New research in Psychological Science has found that the physical notion of cleanliness significantly reduces the severity of moral judgments showing that intuition, rather than deliberate reasoning, can influence our perception of what is right and wrong.

Lead researcher, Simone Schnall, University of Plymouth, explains the relevance of the findings to everyday life; “When we exercise moral judgment, we believe we are making a conscious, rational decision, but this research shows that we are subconsciously influenced by how clean or ‘pure’ we feel.

A new small satellite about the size of a loaf of bread and called Firefly is designed to help solve the mystery of the most powerful natural particle accelerator in Earth's atmosphere - TGFs, or terrestrial gamma-ray flashes - which likely result from thunderstorms.

The mission is the second project under the NSF CubeSat program. A CubeSat satellite consists of three cubes attached end to end in a rectangular shape.

Two of our galaxy's most massive stars, until recently shrouded in mystery, have been viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope, unveiling greater detail than ever before.
 
The image shows a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth. The Carina Nebula contains several ultra-hot stars, including these two star systems and the famous blue star Eta Carinae, which has the highest luminosity yet confirmed.  

A new "barcode chip" developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) promises to revolutionize diagnostic medical testing. In less than 10 minutes, and using just a pinprick's worth of blood, the chip can measure the concentrations of dozens of proteins, including those that herald the presence of diseases like cancer and heart disease. 

The device, known as the Integrated Blood-Barcode Chip, or IBBC, was developed by a group of Caltech researchers led by James R. Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor and professor of chemistry, along with postdoctoral scholar Rong Fan and graduate student Ophir Vermesh, and by Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. 

The Milagro collaboration, comprised of scientists from 16 institutions across the United States, has discovered two nearby regions with an unexpected excess of cosmic rays.   This is the second finding of a source of galactic cosmic rays relatively near Earth announced in the past week. In the November 20 issue of Nature, ATIC an international experiment led by LSU scientists announced finding an unexpected surplus of cosmic-ray electrons from an unidentified but relatively close source.