NASA held a press conference today to announce the discovery of a discovery of the most recent supernova in our galaxy. The discovery was made by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains.

The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent supernova in the Milky Way as measured in Earth's time frame. Previously, the last known galactic supernova occurred around 1680, based on studying the expansion of its remnant Cassiopeia A.

The tracking of this source began in 1985 when astronomers, led by David Green of the University of Cambridge, used the VLA to identify G1.9+0.3 as the remnant of a supernova explosion near the center of our galaxy. Based on its small size, it was thought to have resulted from a supernova that exploded about 400 to 1000 years ago.

Do black NBA coaches have a harder time getting hired and an easier time getting fired? Not according to a new University of Michigan study, though it did find that white coaches with losing records got slightly longer opportunities before being fired than black coaches.

The study found no difference in "technical efficiency" by race of coach, and found no evidence that there are differences in firings based on race, says lead researcher Rodney Fort, U-M professor in the Division of Kinesiology.

Fort claims the NBA is the most integrated professional sport, so the results are not all that surprising. The study says the market for coaches in the NBA works like any other healthy labor market is ideally supposed to work - coaches must win. The researchers used a scoring system to calculate current coach's value, or technical efficiency, by how many wins were produced.

Mice and humans have genomes that are 85% identical, making them suitable and cost-effective stand-ins for humans in medical research. A recent article by University of Michigan evolutionary biologists Ben-Yang Liao and Jianzhi Zhang discussed how identical genes may behave differently in mice and men - and some essential to humans aren't missed at all by mice.

"Everyone assumes that deletion of the same gene in the mouse and in humans produces the same phenotype (an observable trait such as presence or absence of a particular disease). That's the basis of using the mouse to study human disease," said Zhang, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Infants and toddlers whose mothers are severely depressed are almost three times more likely to suffer accidental injuries than other children in the same age group, according to a new study. The study’s findings, published today in the Advanced Access edition of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, suggest that proper treatment for depression would improve not only the mothers’ health, but the health of young children as well.

Prior studies have shown that mothers who reported symptoms consistent with clinical depression had children who experienced a significant number of accidental injuries between the ages 3 months to 2 years.

In his study, UAB psychologist David Schwebel, Ph.D., director of the UAB Youth Safety Lab, examined the difference between mothers with severe, chronic depression and those who were moderately depressed as their children grew from birth to first grade.

Methane, a greenhouse gas with an impact over 20 times greater than CO2, is constantly seeping out of large methane hydrate reservoirs in the ocean floors but 80 percent of it is immediately consumed by syntrophic ("feeding together") microorganisms.

These microorganisms dramatically reduce the oceanic emission of methane into the atmosphere by oxidizing methane anaerobically, providing an important component of the global carbon cycle and a major sink for methane on Earth.

Scientists of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena succeeded in capturing these syntrophic microorganisms, something various international research groups have been working on since 1999.

Scientists with UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center and the Department of Urology have showed that lowering intake of the type of fat common in a Western diet helps prevent prostate cancer in mice, the first finding of its kind in a mouse model that closely mimics human cancer, researchers said.

The study, which appears in the April 15, 2008 issue of the journal Cancer Research, focused on fat from corn oil, which is made up primarily of omega-6 fatty acids, or the polyunsaturated fat commonly found in the Western diet. Omega-6 fats are found in high levels in baked and fried goods, said William Aronson, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and the study’s senior author.

Researchers fed one group of mice a diet with about 40 percent of calories coming from fat, a percentage typical in men eating a Western diet. The other group received 12 percent of their calories from fat, a figure considered to be a very low fat diet. Researchers found there was a 27 percent reduced incidence of prostate cancer in the low-fat diet group. Aronson also studied cells in the prostate that were precancerous, or would soon become cancer, and found that the cells in the mice eating the low-fat diet were growing much more slowly than those in the high-fat group.

We all know that children who are popular do well socially. A new study has found that teenagers who feel good about themselves and are comfortable with their peers can also be socially successful without being popular in the traditional sense.

These findings come from researchers at the University of Virginia and are published in the May/June 2008 issue of the journal Child Development.

Researchers studied 164 adolescents from racially, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse backgrounds. The teens were interviewed at age 13 and then again at 14. The researchers also interviewed the adolescents’ same-sex close friends.

A study investigating aging in mice has found that hormonal changes that occur when mice eat significantly less may help explain an already established phenomenon: a low calorie diet can extend the lifespan of rodents, a benefit that even regular exercise does not achieve.

“We know that being lean rather than obese is protective from many diseases, but key rodent studies tell us that being lean from eating less, as opposed to exercising more, has greater benefit for living longer. This study was designed to understand better why that is,” said Derek M. Huffman, the study’s lead author.

The study applies only to rodents, which are different in some key ways from humans, cautions Huffman.

Common Sense 101: if benefits outweigh the costs, generally people will opt in to whatever action is under consideration. If you can prevent or reduce your chance of death from cancer by early screenings at a nominal fee, you will probably get screened. Now throw a twist into the equation. Say that screening is only 50 percent effective at catching early cancer. On the benefit side, screening will still prevent or reduce cancer. On the cost side, you may not catch a tumor; you may be exposing yourself to harmful radiation (which ironically could contribute to the cancer you’re trying to prevent), emotional stress from false positives and possible physical harm from false negatives; and you’re spending money on a service that only works half the time. (Using the same idea, if your airbag only worked in 50 percent of accidents, would you pay for it to be installed in your car, or would you demand that auto manufacturers developed an airbag with 100 percent efficiency?)

I’m reading a delightful history of chess, The Immortal Game, by David Shenk, and got to the chapter dealing with the dark side of chess: the fact that a small but significant number of top players throughout history have gone off the deep end -- including the famous American world champion Bobby Fisher.

As is usual with correlations (playing chess <=> your brain goes bonk), it is not clear which way the causality goes, if at all. It could be that playing chess at the highest levels affects the mind in negative ways; it may be that abnormal minds are more likely than others to be attracted by the game; or it could simply be that the correlation is spurious, i.e. non-causal.

Shenk does not take sides on this debate, but he does report the pronouncements of a number of Freudian psychoanalysts on the matter. For instance, Ernest Jones (Freud’s biographer and protege), confidently stated that “It is plain that the unconscious motive activating [chess] players is not the mere love of pugnacity characteristic of all competitive games, but the grimmer one of father murder.” What?? That’s right, it’s the good ‘ol Oedipus complex -- itself rooted in the all-encompassing Freudian explanation for human behavior, sex drives -- that pushes players to protect their Queen (=mother) and checkmate the King (=father). Here is some more nonsense from Jones (p. 147 of Shenk’s):