Neutrinos can pass right through your body, the walls of your house, entire planets, even emerging from near the surface of fascinating and frightening black holes. 

And now, an international scientific collaboration  using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory telescope built over a mile deep in the Antarctic ice has taken an 'astronomical' step forward in unmasking the origins of some of these high-energy particles, the so-called "messengers of the universe."

The researchers have observed 28 very high-energy particle events and they constitute the first solid evidence of neutrinos coming from "cosmic accelerators"—potentially such sources as exploding stars or accreting black holes. 

Drinking and marriage don't mix - unless both spouses do, according to a recent paper by the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) which followed 634 couples from the time of their weddings through the first nine years of marriage.

The results: couples where only one spouse was a heavy drinker had a much higher divorce rate than other couples but if both spouses were heavy drinkers, the divorce rate was the same as for couples where neither were heavy drinkers. 

In drug design, the protein K-Ras has been on everyone's target list for more than 30 years due to its status as the most commonly mutated oncogene in human cancers.

Despite its high profile, K-Ras has been "undruggable" - many pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic laboratories have failed to design a drug that successfully targets the mutant gene.

Older men with moderate testosterone,
a key male sex hormone involved in maintaining sex drive, sperm production and bone health
, tend to live longer, according to a new paper.

Physicians have long known that low testosterone levels can signal health problems, but the new study found men may not fare better when levels of the hormone rise too high. 

The population-based cohort study analyzed the mortality rate in a group of 3,690 community-dwelling men between the ages of 70 to 89 in Perth, Western Australia. Participants' testosterone and DHT levels were measured between 2001 and 2004. Researchers analyzed the group's survival rate as of December 2010.

When Neil Armstrong took his first step for all mankind in 1969, researchers obviously had no idea how much of a nuisance the lunar soil beneath his feet would be. The scratchy dust clung to everything it touched, causing scientific instruments to overheat and, for Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a sort of lunar dust hay fever. The annoying particles even prompted a scientific experiment to figure out how fast they collect, but the data got lost.

Maybe you like to eat carp. Invasive Asian carp have been successfully harvested and served on a dinner plate but the idea of similarly harvesting invasive plants and converting them into ethanol isn't realistic yet - even less realistic than currently mandated and subsidized ethanol. 

Obviously, harvesting invasive plants for use as biofuels is a great idea and merits basic research but from a policy point of view, let's hope the government does not start throwing money at companies. For now, it faces poses numerous obstacles and is too expensive to consider, at least with the current ethanol pathways.