The Permian was a geologic period that ended more than 250 million years ago. The Earth consisted of one forested super-continent called Pangea and a large ocean called Panthalassa teemed with life.

It wasn't going to last, we know the largest mass extinction ever recorded was om the horizon. Why did it happen? The favorite hypothesis is that a series of massive volcanic eruptions deposited rocks now known as the Siberian Traps, released gases causing planet-wide acid rain showers that damaged the biosphere.

Time-dependent Maxwell's equations in media 

By Robyn Arianrhod, Monash University

It’s hard to imagine life without mobile phones, radio and television. Yet the discovery of the electromagnetic waves that underpin such technologies grew out of an abstract theory that’s 150 years old.

By using spatial analysis software and electronic medical records to identify clusters of under-immunization and vaccine refusal among Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California, researches don't just know where anti-vaccine sentiment is more prominent - that correlates to voting registration and has been well-documented, but now they also know how long the anti-vaccine beliefs have been evident.

Can a penalty kick simultaneously score a goal and miss?

In the realm of quantum mechanics that is certainly be true, because microscopic objects can take different paths at the same time.  Almost 100 years ago physicists Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and Erwin Schrödinger created this new field of physics which would be called quantum mechanics. Objects of the quantum world, according to quantum theory, no longer move along a single well-defined path. Rather, they can simultaneously take different paths and end up at different places at once. Physicists speak of quantum superposition of different paths.  

The publishing giant Elsevier is about to launch a new journal, Reviews in Physics. This will be a fully open-access, peer-reviewed journal which aims at providing short reviews (15 pages maximum) on physics topics at the forefront of research. The web page of the journal is here, and a screenshot is shown below.

There are up to 400 chemical compounds on human skin that could play a role in attracting mosquitoes. sookie, CC BY-SA

By Cameron Webb, University of Sydney

There’s always one in a crowd, a sort of harbinger of the oncoming mosquito onslaught: a person mosquitoes seem to target more than others. What is it about these unlucky chosen few that makes them mosquito magnets?

CohBar, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on discovering mitochondrial-derived peptides and developing them into therapeutics, completed an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of 11,250,000 units at a price of $1.00 each. 

All units consist of one share of CohBar's common stock and one-half of one common stock purchase warrant. 

Upending decades-old dogma, researchers say enzymes long categorized as promoting cancer are, in fact, tumor suppressors and that current clinical efforts to develop inhibitor-based drugs should instead focus on restoring the enzymes' activities.

Protein Kinase C (PKC) is a group of enzymes that act as catalysts for a host of cellular functions, among which are cancer-relevant activities, such as cell survival, proliferation, apoptosis, and migration. The discovery that they are receptors for tumor-producing phorbol esters, plant-derived compounds that bind to and activate PKC, created a dogma that activation of PKCs by phorbol esters promoted carcinogen-induced tumorigenesis.

A team of scientists based at Brown University has found that reducing expression of a fundamentally important gene called Myc significantly increased the healthy lifespan of laboratory mice, the first such finding regarding this gene in a mammalian species.

Myc is found in the genomes of all animals, ranging from ancestral single-celled organisms to humans. It is a major topic of biomedical research and has been shown to be a central regulator of cell proliferation, growth, and death. It is of such widespread and fundamental importance that animals cannot live without it. But in humans and mice, too much expression of the protein that Myc encodes has been closely linked to cancer, making it a well-known but elusive target of drug developers.

A group of white blood cells known as B cells play a key role in the human immune response but need a protein-targeting signal called mannose 6-phosphate (M6P) in order to proliferate, differentiate, and present immune cell-activating antigens, according to a study in The Journal of Cell Biology.

Immune cells slice up antigens in organelles called lysosomes and attach the fragments to complexes that display them on the cell surface in order for these peptides to bind and activate other immune cells. To ensure that they can cut up the antigens, cells steer newly made enzymes to lysosomes by tagging them with M6P molecules.