A new Commonwealth Fund study says that the United States should adopt the policies of Switzerland and the Netherlands.    Those countries have near-universal coverage, though they have to subsidize up to 40 percent of families since individual health coverage is mandated by law.

The result?  Both countries effectively cover all but one percent of their population, compared with 15 percent uninsured in the U.S.

Scientists at deCODE genetics have completed the largest study of ancient DNA from a single population ever undertaken. Analyzing mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to offspring, from 68 skeletal remains, the study provides a detailed look at how a contemporary population differs from that of its ancestors.

The results confirm previous deCODE work that used genetics to test the history of Iceland as recorded in the sagas. These studies demonstrated that the country seems to have been settled by men from Scandinavia – the vikings – but that the majority of the original female inhabitants were from the coastal regions of Scotland and Ireland, areas that regularly suffered raids by vikings in the years around the settlement of Iceland 1100 years ago. 

Scientists say they have developed a mathematical model of the mating game to help explain why courtship is often protracted.   That's right, there may one day be a numerical model to tell you why women under 30 like the Bad Boys but over age 30 they like men that are employed.
 
The study by researchers at University College London (UCL), University of Warwick and LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science), says that extended courtship enables a male to signal his suitability to a female and enables the female to screen out the male if he is unsuitable as a mate.

Katy Kao, assistant professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, and Stanford University colleague Gavin Sherlock say their new study of yeast cells has resulted in the most detailed picture of an organism's evolutionary process to date.

Working with populations of yeast cells, which were color-coded by fluorescent markers,  they were able to evolve the cells while maintaining a visual analysis of the entire process. 

What does that mean?   It means the evolutionary process is even more dynamic than initially thought, with multiple beneficial adaptations arising within a population. These adaptations, Kao explained, triggered a competition between these segments, known as "clonal interference." 

The ecology is a dynamic, complex system so even small changes, or small experiments, can have big responses.   Some of these responses, including insect outbreaks, wildfire, and forest dieback, may adversely affect people as well as ecosystems and their plants and animals. 

Writing in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, a group of researchers found that nutrient deprivation of neurons produced sex-dependent effects. Male neurons more readily withered up and died, while female neurons did their best to conserve energy and stay alive.

That's right, nature has declared female brains should survive with a lot less than males.   Take that, glass ceiling!

The idea that the sexes respond differently to nutrient deprivation is not new and revolves around the male preferences to conserve protein and female preferences to conserve fat. However, these metabolic differences have really only been examined in nutrient-rich tissues like muscles, fat deposits, and the liver. 

While the scientific community, and most of the intelligent world, has widely accepted that the theory of natural selection is underlying mechanism of organic evolution, until recently our studies of evolutionary processes have been confined to the examples from a small plant orbiting an insignificant star in a mid-sized galaxy. From this limited viewpoint we know that evolution is intimately connected with life... but as scientists, we would love to expand the reaches of our database.

Scientists have achieved the first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars, which would seem to indicate our reddish neighbor is biologically active.   Or geologically active.   Or both.

Wait, how can a bunch of smart people from NASA not know which?   

It's because methane, four atoms of hydrogen bound to a carbon atom, is the main component of natural gas on Earth and is released by organisms as they (and we) digest nutrients  but is also created in purely geological processes, like oxidation of iron. 

At 10¹⁴ gauss, atoms are compressed into tiny needles whose widths are only 1% of their lengths. X-ray photons readily undergo an exotic process where they change into matter and anti-matter particles briefly, before rejoining and turning back into light. Even at a distance of 1000 km, the slight polarization of water molecules would tear apart any Earth organism. So where do you find magnetic fields of such awe-inspiring strength? Attached to exotic objects in deep space, of course.

The unique planetary nebula NGC 2818 is nested inside the open star cluster NGC 2818A. Both the cluster and the nebula reside 10,400 light-years (3.2 kiloparsecs) away, in the southern constellation Pyxis, also called the Compass.

NGC 2818 is one of very few planetary nebulae in our galaxy located within an open cluster. Open clusters, in general, are loosely bound and they disperse over hundreds of millions of years. Stars that form planetary nebulae typically live for billions of years. Hence, it is rare that an open cluster survives long enough for one of its members to form a planetary nebula. This open cluster is particularly ancient, estimated to be nearly one billion years old.