A research team has provided ground-truth for a method of measuring plant photosynthesis on a global scale: from low-Earth orbit.

There is discussion of a U.S. manned mission to Mars but if recent history is any indication, the next president will undo the space program of the current one, just as the current one undid the manned space program of the last.

It may be for the best, at least as far astronaut safety is concerned. The destructive particles in galactic cosmic ray exposure can forever impair cognition, according to an oncology paper in Science Advances.

As yesterday in Italy was the equivalent of Labor Day, and today is a Saturday, with people around me exploiting the three-day rest for a recreational trip, I do not feel in a very productive mood, so rather than writing something original here I will exploit other people's work, pointing at what I found interesting or anyway worth my attention among the papers appeared on the Cornell Arxiv in the last few days, and other assorted material.

Antarctica's massive ice sheet has recently lost twice the amount of ice in the west as what it  accumulated in the east, and the southern continent's ice cap is melting ever faster, according to a new study in which researchers "weighed" Antarctica's ice sheet using gravitational satellite data and found that from 2003 to 2014, the ice sheet lost 92 billion tons of ice per year.

If stacked on the island of Manhattan, that amount of ice would be a mile high, more than five times the height of the Empire State Building.

Everyone loves vampire squid, right? Their monstrous name belies their gentle nature as graceful underwater flyers who eat poop.

A protein that normally fosters tissue repair instead acts to inhibit healing when sugar levels are high, according to a new study, and that role reversal helps explain why wounds heal slowly in people with diabetes.

When educating medical students or residents, there is always a need to balance quality results and optimal patient care with the educational mission - and when it comes to cardiac surgery residents, it works just fine.

A new study found no differences in patient outcomes or graft patency between the residents and attending surgeons when it came to coronary artery bypass grafting. 

The analysis of prospective data from a study of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) found no differences in short-term or one-year patient outcomes and patency of grafts between properly-supervised residents and attending surgeons. G. Hossein Almassi, MD, presented the results of the research earlier this week at the 95th AATS Annual Meeting in Seattle.

Detecting an earthquake on Venus is no trivial task.

For one thing, it is not a surface like we think of surface. It is under crushing pressure and the temperate is almost 900 degrees. Ordinary seismic instruments aren't suited for that. But the upper atmosphere is not so bad by comparison and so researchers hope to deploy an array of balloons or satellites that could detect Venusian seismic activity.

And instead of using vibrations they will use sound.

The ability to move in water is key to existence for many species so it may not be a surprise that so many species have converged on swimming. What is intriguing is how diverse creatures have evolved to swim with elongated fins using the same mechanical motion that optimizes their speed.

The Persian carpet flatworm, the cuttlefish and the black ghost knifefish are nothing like each other - their last common ancestor lived 550 million years ago, before the Cambrian period - but all three aquatic creatures converged evolutionaru on the same swimming, according to a new study uses a combination of computer simulations, a robotic fish and video footage of real fish. 

A hacked Microsoft Kinect games controller has been used to relieve one of the most distressing symptoms of Parkinson's - freezing of gait.

Many patients are afflicted by 'freezing of gait' where suddenly, in mid-stride, the muscles freeze and they are left unable to move forward, or they simply fall over. Previous research has found that giving visual clues, such as projecting lines ahead on the floor, “unfreezes” the muscles but equipment had to be worn.