Could you make an ancient beer using nothing but ancient tools?

Probably, if you know how to make beer anyway.  But would it be authentic ancient beer? Archaeologists and brewmasters have been trying to make just that kind, sparing no effort to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using nothing more complex than clay jugs and a wooden spoon.

It's the ultimate artisan brew. 

We all think about space exploration, but we also need to think about dodging 50 years of debris from space exploration - aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites. Sierra Club hasn't started fundraising over this issue yet but they might after reading this article.

According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized. Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per second, roughly ten times faster than a speeding bullet.

Michael Graner, PhD, a CU Cancer Center investigator and associate professor of neurosurgery at the CU School of Medicine, experimented on his dog.

Before anyone yells "Tesla!" and PETA gets up in arms, he did it for the best of reasons.  At age 12, his great dane Star collapsed during a coughing fit and Graner discovered the cause: lung cancer, specifically advanced bronchoalveolar adenocarcinoma with metastasis to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was grim, with a median survival from diagnosis of only about 6-27 days. And Star was well past the age when she could've tolerated chemotherapy or radiation. 

The minds of murderers who kill impulsively - crimes of passion, as they are commonly called - and those who carefully carry out premeditated crimes differ markedly both psychologically and intellectually, according to a new paper.

Jacques Distler is a Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, and a distinguished theorist, as well as a physics blogger. Along with experimentalist Gordon Watts (who covered $250) he took my $1000 bet that the LHC would not discover new physics in its first 10/fb of proton-proton collision data. I discussed my take on the bet in a previous post; here Jacques explains his point of view, why he took the bet, and what he thinks of the present situation with new physics searches at the high-energy frontier.
The article below has appeared today at Distler's blog, and I reproduce it here with his permission.

Sr35 has been identified as a gene that enables resistance to a new race, or strain, of stem rust, a disease that is producing large wheat yield losses throughout Africa and Asia and threatening global food security.

Adults may not understand what an infant is feeling but it's child's play to another baby.

A paper in Infancy contends that infants can recognize each other's emotions by five months of age. 

"Newborns can't verbalize to their mom or dad that they are hungry or tired, so the first way they communicate is through affect or emotion," says  psychology professor Ross Flom  of
Brigham Young University
. "Thus it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect."

Rat poison used for marijuana fields is killing fishers in the southern Sierra Nevada, according to a new paper. 

Oxygen is necessary for survival on Earth but the planet's atmosphere did not always contain this life-sustaining substance. One of science's greatest mysteries is how and when oxygenic photosynthesis—the process responsible for producing oxygen on Earth through the splitting of water molecules—first began.

Geobiologists writing in PNAS say they have found evidence of a precursor photosystem involving manganese that predates cyanobacteria, the first group of organisms to release oxygen into the environment via photosynthesis.  

All stars begin their lives in groups, though most, including our Sun, are born in small, benign groups that quickly fell apart. Others form in huge, dense swarms that survive for billions of years as stellar clusters.

Within such rich and dense clusters, stars jostle for room with thousands of neighbors while strong radiation and harsh stellar winds scour interstellar space, stripping planet-forming materials from nearby stars.

That's an unlikely place to find alien worlds.

Yet 3,000 light-years from Earth in the star cluster NGC 6811, astronomers have found two planets smaller than Neptune orbiting Sun-like stars.