On my first day at the Erice School of Science Journalism this past week I attended a lecture by Alessio Cimarelli, who discussed "When Data Journalism meets Science: a "Hackathon"". The speaker (who owns the site called "dataninja") showed several examples of how to mine the web to construct databases and display results on several topics. It was quite interesting to see the techniques he used, but I felt compelled to interrupt him at some point, in the interest of the school participants.

Titan, the most famous moon around Saturn, has an atmosphere that is a brownish-orange haze. The dirty color comes from a mixture of hydrocarbons, molecules that contain hydrogen and carbon, and nitrogen-carrying chemicals called nitriles. The family of hydrocarbons already has hundreds of thousands of members, identified from plants and fossil fuels on Earth, and even more could exist.

The class of drug known as p110δ inhibitors, currently being used to treat leukemia, has the unexpected side-effect of boosting immune responses against many different cancers, according to a study led by pharmaceutical company Genentech in San Francisco

p110δ inhibitors have shown such remarkable efficacy against certain leukemias in recent clinical trials that patients on the placebo were switched to the real drug - but they have not been tested in other types of cancer.  The p110δ enzyme is a member of the PI3-kinase family, and is sometimes called PI3Kδ. p110δ and the other PI3Ks are hot drug targets for the pharmaceutical industry as they are implicated in many cancers and are readily druggable.

Two studies  presented today at the Goldschmidt 2014 geochemistry conference in Sacramento show that the movement rate of plates carrying the Earth's crust may not be constant over time. That could provide a new explanation for the patterns observed in the speed of evolution and has implications for the interpretation of climate models.  

The Earth's continental crust is an archive of Earth's history and it is the basis for studies on rock formation, the atmosphere and the fossil record - but it is not clear when and how regularly crust formed since the beginning of Earth history 4.5 billion years ago. 

Do you know where the solar system ends? Not really. We know it does, but picking a hard boundary is difficult.

And when it comes to anthropogenic emissions and air quality, it is hard to know for sure also. How much of CO2 is natural? How are we past the tipping point for CO2 levels while warming has not risen? 

How are emissions calculated? Different ranges of emission fluxes have been proposed by several studies, which have provided emissions at different spatial and temporal scales. Reconciling them all is difficult An EU funded project called Monitoring Atmospheric Composition&Climate II (MACC ll) seeks to hone in on real answers.

Most people feel comfortable conducting financial transactions on the Web, the cryptographic schemes that protect online banking and credit card purchases have proven their reliability over decades.

Pluto orbits the sun more than 29 times farther away than Earth, with a surface temperature estimated to be about 380 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

The environment on Pluto, which 2 percent of astronomers voted on no longer being really a planet anyway, is far too cold to allow liquid water on its surface. Its moons are in the same frigid environment.

Pluto's remoteness and small size make it difficult to observe so take speculation about Charon, a moon of Pluto, having cracks in its surface and perhaps a subterranean ocean of liquid water, with a grain of otherworldly salt. In July of 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be the first to visit Pluto and Charon, until then we have numerical models and a fair amount of educated guessing. 

Recent mass killings have again raised concern among lawmakers and the media about the possible connection between mental illness, and drugs to treat it, and gun violence.  Obviously someone who commits a mass shooting is mentally ill so renewed focus has been on the impact of a modern medical culture which over-medicates a lot of behavior. Guns have always been a part of American culture and individual murders are down, but a spate of mass shootings has occurred recently, causing people to search for a cause beyond simplistic 'ban guns' exploitation.

Heart attack is the leading natural killer worldwide, with up to one in two men and one in three women past the age of 40 having heart attacks in their lifetimes. What if one shot, similar to a vaccine, could prevent that?

Writing in Circulation Research, researchers show they have developed a “genome-editing” approach for permanently reducing cholesterol levels in mice through a single injection, a development that could reduce the risk of heart attacks in humans by 40 to 90 percent.

There is a common perception is that if you are sick, you sleep more, and some people do - but a new study found that sickness induced insomnia is quite common.

Fighting off illness – rather than the illness itself – causes sleep deprivation and affects memory, says University of Leicester biologist Dr. Eamonn Mallo.