When a female is attracted to a male, entire suites of genes in her brain turn on and off, show biologists from The University of Texas at Austin studying swordtail fish.

Molly Cummings and Hans Hofmann found that some genes were turned on when females found a male attractive, but a larger number of genes were turned off.

“When females were most excited—when attractive males were around—we observed the greatest down regulation [turning off] of genes,” said Cummings, assistant professor of integrative biology. “It’s possible that this could lead to a release of inhibition, a transition to being receptive to mating.”

A new genus and species of dinosaur from the Early Jurassic has been discovered in Antarctica. The massive plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived about 190 million years ago.

The recently published description of the new dinosaur is based on partial foot, leg and ankle bones found on Mt. Kirkpatrick near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet.

“The fossils were painstakingly removed from the ice and rock using jackhammers, rock saws and chisels under extremely difficult conditions over the course of two field seasons,” said Nathan Smith, a graduate student at The Field Museum.

A collaboration of over 50 astronomers, The IPHAS consortium, led from the UK, with partners in Europe, USA, Australia, has released today (10th December 2007) the first comprehensive optical digital survey of our own Milky Way. Conducted by looking at light emitted by hydrogen ions, using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma, the survey contains stunning red images of nebulae and stars. The data is described in a paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

To date, the IPHAS survey includes some 200 million unique objects in the newly released catalogue. This immense resource will foster studies that can be at once both comprehensive and subtle, of the stellar demographics of the Milky Way and of its three-dimensional structure.

Vanessa Hull, 25, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, is in the snowy, remote mountains of the Sichuan Province of China--the heart of panda habitat. She's hoping to capture, collar and track up to four wild pandas using advanced global positioning systems.

Along with her research gear, Hull, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellow and MSU University Distinguished Fellow, is lugging a small digital video camera and a laptop computer.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has entered a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars, called the heliosheath, and what it found is surprising - our solar system is 'dented.'

Voyager 2 entered the heliosheath on August 30, 2007, crossing the heliosheath boundary, called the solar wind termination shock, about 10 billion miles away from Voyager 1 and almost a billion miles closer to the sun, and confirmed that our solar system is “squashed” – that the bubble carved into interstellar space by the solar wind is not perfectly round.

Two researchers have found that the effects of the current warming and melting of Greenland 's glaciers that has alarmed the world's climate scientists occurred in the decades following an abrupt warming in the 1920s.

Their evidence reinforces the belief that glaciers and other bodies of ice are exquisitely hyper-sensitive to climate chang.

Using weather station records from the past century, they recently recognized that temperatures in Greenland had warmed in the 1920s at rates equivalent to the recent past. But they hadn't confirmed that the island's glaciers responded to that earlier warming until now.