Where do new genes come from?

It's a long standing debate in evolutionary biology but a new paper in Science Express says that new genes are created from non-coding DNA, and more rapidly than expected.

If you think wilding was much more civilized when you were young, well, you're old.

Older people are more likely to regard the behavior of younger people as anti-social, even if it doesn't bother young people at all. One example is swearing. 80% of adults in a recent survey thought swearing in a public place was anti-social behavior compared while less than 43% of young people did. When it comes to skateboarding on the street, over 60% of adults were against it while less than 8% of young people were. Mysteriously, even douchebikery behavior by cyclists had a generation gap regarding how annoying it was.

A new paper has demonstrated the power of path tracking to measure social behavior and automatically determine dogs' personalities.

How dogs behave during walks reveals a lot about traits such as trainability, controllability, aggression, age and dominance. Dogs that consistently took the lead were more responsive to training, more controllable, older and more aggressive than the dogs that tended to follow.

Dogs that led more often had higher dominance ranks in everyday situations, assessed by a dominance questionnaire.

Human induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from human umbilical cord-blood are capable of repairing damaged retinal vascular tissue in mice, according to a new paper.

The adult stem cells were coaxed turned into an embryonic-like state without the conventional use of viruses, which can mutate genes (and thus initiate cancers) and paves the way for regenerative medicine using a stem cell bank of cord-blood derived iPSCs.

What would you do if you were on a borehole drilling expedition and tapped into 1,000 degree Celcius magma at slightly over a mile deep?

Most people would run but the Icelandic Deep Drilling Project
at Krafla in 2009 felt a sense of accomplishment. It was only the second known instance of drilling onto magma (the first was in Hawaii in 2007 and there were on a search for high-temperature geothermal resources.