How to explain modern belief?    A rising number of people report having no formal religious affiliation but the number of Americans who say they pray has increased, according to a new survey from the University of Chicago.

'Spiritual but not religious' as a growing category seems to mean very little, since it seeks to straddle two different worlds, but the results are telling;  in addition to an increased number of people who pray, a growing number believe in the afterlife. When asked how they view God, the most common responses were the traditional images of father and judge.

So it seems to be formal religion that is on the wane, not an increase in secular or atheist sentiment.

A new species of dinosaur, an ankylosaur, that lived 112 million years ago during the early Cretaceous of central Montana has been described by paleontologists writing in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences and the Bulletin of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences.

Ankylosaurs are the biological version of an army tank; they were protected by a plate-like armor with two sets of sharp spikes on each side of the head, and a skull so thick that even 'raptors' such as Deinonychus could leave barely more than a scratch.

With all of the concern/hype/hysteria over vaccines for H1N1 influenza, a team of Alabama researchers say they may have found a way to protect lungs from all strains of the flu—antioxidants. In an article appearing in the FASEB Journal they say that antioxidants might hold the key in preventing the flu virus from wreaking havoc on our lungs. 

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) had been used to treat menopausal estrogen deficiency  for decades but the 2002 publication of a major study, the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), indicated increased risk for certain outcomes in older women, without increasing longevity.

This sparked debate regarding potential benefits and harm of HRT.

A new article published in The American Journal of Medicine conducted a meta-analysis of the available data using Bayesian methods and concluded that HRT almost certainly decreases mortality in younger postmenopausal women. 

An explosion detected on April 23 by NASA's Swift satellite was more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, representing an event that occurred 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only four percent of its current age of 13.7 billion years.

Astronomers turned telescopes from around the world to study the blast, dubbed GRB 090423.  National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) first looked for the object the day after the discovery, detected the first radio waves from the blast a week later, then recorded changes in the object until it faded from view more than two months later.

Researchers say they have discovered how to transform human embryonic stem cells into germ cells, the embryonic cells that ultimately give rise to sperm and eggs, an advance that will allow researchers to observe previously inaccessible human germ cells in laboratory dishes.

"This achievement opens a new window into what was only recently a hidden stage of human development," said Susan B. Shurin, M.D., acting director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH Institute that provided funding for the study. "Laboratory observation of human germ cells has the potential to yield important clues to the origins of unexplained infertility and to the genesis of many birth defects and chromosomal disorders."