Unique cellular and molecular mechanisms behind tooth renewal in American alligators may help science learn how to stimulate tooth regeneration in people, according to a new study.

We regenerate teeth now. We grow baby teeth and then we replace those with adult teeth.  Yet most vertebrates can replace teeth throughout their lives and we cannot, despite the lingering presence of dental lamina, a band of epithelial tissue crucial to tooth development. Because alligators have well-organized teeth with similar form and structure as mammalian teeth and are capable of lifelong tooth renewal, the authors reasoned that they might serve as models for mammalian tooth replacement. 

There are some places where food is easy to grow and some where it is not. Nature is not fair.

Expecting companies in countries with food to ship it everywhere for free is not practical and the poorest people don't have the money to import food, so they are stuck in a hunger Catch-22. There are differing schools of thought on how to solve the problem.

The positive approach - science - is to make it possible for food to grow in areas where food cannot grow now. Plants can be optimized scientifically to thrive in areas where they ordinarily would not. Then there is a less positive approach; tell poor people to eat bugs.

Detecting alien worlds is a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). 

A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet and the planet they found, Kepler-76b, was identified by the BEER algorithm; an acronym for relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection/emission modulations. BEER was developed by Professor Tsevi Mazeh and his student, Simchon Faigler, at Tel Aviv University in Israel and is a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

We all know that the Earth is in constant motion, rotating beneath our feet, but new research in Nature Geoscience reveals that the center of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet and is frequently speeding up and slowing down.

Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and his team used earthquake doublets to measure the rotation speed of Earth’s inner core over the last 50 years and discovered that not only did the inner core rotate at a different rate to the mantle – the layer between the core and the crust that makes up most of the planet’s interior – but its rotation speed was variable.

Responsible energy production would seem to have an obvious positive roadmap; have energy companies include environmental groups in guiding pollution standards and participating in studies about natural gas extraction.

But for entrenched constituencies, that is unacceptable.

Rather than Draconian measures to cut emissions, which will impact people in various regions and economic spheres unfairly, a better solution may be to simply keep places cooler on hot days, which will reduce fuel needed for air conditioning.

And outer space can help, Stanford researchers say. They designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining - by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. 

The movement of nitrate through groundwater to streams can take decades to occur and that long lag time means that changes in the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer (the typical source of nitrate) may take decades to be fully observed in streams, according to a recent study.

Water quality experts have been noting in recent years that nitrate trends in streams and rivers do not match their expectations based on reduced regional use of nitrogen-based fertilizer.  The long travel times of groundwater discharge, like those documented in this study, have previously been suggested as the likely factor responsible for these observations.

The large majority of non-coding DNA, which is abundant in many living things, may not actually be needed for complex life in at least one carnivorous plant, Utricularia gibba, according to a paper in Nature.

U. gibba,  the carnivorous bladderwort plant, genome is the smallest ever to be sequenced from a complex, multicellular plant. The researchers who sequenced it say that 97 percent of the genome consists of genes — bits of DNA that code for proteins — and small pieces of DNA that control those genes.

Pollution and Parliament

Is carbon dioxide a pollutant ?

I am old enough to remember the great smog and the 1953 flood.  There is nothing like a first-hand view of nature in the raw to make a person environmentally aware.  It was in the 1950s at the age of about 6 or 7 that I learned how coal was made out of vegetable matter in nature's own pressure cooker.  The origin of coal was so widely known that it was often called 'bottled sunshine'.

Hornswoggled with a Boondoggle

Etymology isn't a true science, but any etymologist worthy of the name needs to adopt scientific methods if he or she is to avoid falling into the trap of producing another piece of false etymology.

That's etymology, but if you mouth entomology, as many of your peers do, I had as lief an insect spoke my lines.  
(Hamlet  Act 3, Scene 2 - almost.)

I had as lief an insect spoke my lines