Is there an objective biological basis for the experience of beauty in art? Or is aesthetic experience entirely subjective? This question has been addressed in a paper by Cinzia Di Dio, Emiliano Macaluso and Giacomo Rizzolatti. The researchers used fMRI scans to study the neural activity in subjects with no knowledge of art criticism, who were shown images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures.

The ‘objective’ perspective was examined by contrasting images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures of canonical proportions, with images of the same sculptures whose proportions were altered to create a comparable degraded aesthetic value.

The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two and a half meters long, much taller than the average man.

This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.

Dr Simon Braddy from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, co-author of an article about the find, said, ‘This is an amazing discovery.

Vase or face? When presented with the well known optical illusion in which we see either a vase or the faces of two people, what we observe depends on the patterns of neural activity going on in our brains.

“In this example, whether you see faces or vases depends entirely on changes that occur in your brain, since the image always stays exactly the same,” said John Serences, a UC Irvine cognitive neuroscientist.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Serences and co-author Geoffrey Boynton, associate professor at the University of Washington, found that when viewing ambiguous images such as optical illusions, patterns of neural activity within specific brain regions systematically change as perception changes.

This month we've witnessed the first-time success of two important stem cell research techniques in primate cells. Both techniques were previously developed in mice, but their success in humans and monkeys is important. Stem cells from cloned embryos have been generated from macaque cells. And now this week, two papers (here and here - this last one is a PDF file) have been published that are reporting that adult human skin cells can be reprogrammed to become stem cells. However, do the results of this week's papers mean that we no longer need to get stem cells from embryos? The answer, for now, is a resounding no - reprogrammed skin cells currently have some serious drawbacks that need to be overcome before they can become worth trying in disease treatments.

Whales were the economic drivers of the 1850s. So important was this resource that the founder of the U.S. Oceanographic Office, Matthew Fontaine Maury, created a map showing the worldwide distribution of sperm and right whales in 1851.

“Whale oil then was like petroleum is today,” says Christopher Baruth. “This is a graphic device that showed where the whales were located by type and season.”

Baruth is curator of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library, where a copy of the whale map is one of thousands of rare cartographical materials and geographical photographs.

The Mappamundi, the oldest original map in the AGSL holdings, was produced in 1452 by the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo.

Using supercomputers to compare portions of the human genome with those of other mammals, researchers at Cornell have discovered some 300 previously unidentified human genes, and found extensions of several hundred genes already known.

The discovery is based on the idea that as organisms evolve, sections of genetic code that do something useful for the organism change in different ways.

The research is reported by Adam Siepel, Cornell assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology, Cornell postdoctoral researcher Brona Brejova and colleagues at several other institutions in the journal Genome Research.

Most of us are familiar with the mantra of how science progresses: A hypothesis can never be completely proved by any finite set of experiments but it can be falsified by a single result. In mathematical proofs, clear cut algorithms can usually be applied to prove unequivocally the falsehood of a theorem (notwithstanding Godel's incompleteness theorems :) But in real research in the physical sciences, that is not exactly how scientists process reports of experimental results.

Acclaimed stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, has reported that he and his Kyoto University colleagues have successfully reprogrammed human adult cells to function like pluripotent embryonic stem (ES) cells. Because it circumvents much of the controversy and restrictions regarding generation of ES cells from human embryos, this breakthrough, reported in the journal Cell, should accelerate the pace of stem cell research.

Last year, Yamanaka, who is also a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD), reported that he and his Kyoto colleagues had reprogrammed mouse skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, laying the foundation to apply this methodology in human cells.

There's always been speculation that human embryonic stem cell research was not worth the controversy due to uncertainty about their value in research and objections from womens' rights groups on one side and right-to-life groups on the other.

Pluripotent cell lines from a non-embryonic source would seem to satisfy everyone

By introducing four genes into human fibroblasts,researchers can transform adult human skin cells into cells that resemble embryonic stem cells, researchers report in Cell. The converted cells have many of the physical, growth and genetic features typically found in embryonic stem cells and can differentiate to produce other tissue types, including neurons and heart tissue, according to the researchers.

To derive embryonic stem cells, it is necessary to remove critical cells from an embryo, resulting in its destruction. That triggers opposition from right-to-life critics of the research, who cite moral and ethical concerns.

The research has also generated opposition from some members of the women's movement who object the use of stimulating drugs in women who agree to donate eggs for cloning research aimed at creating specialized embryonic stem cell lines.

Recent research has the potential to render both of those objections moot, since it showed that introducing four genes into cells derived from skin cells, called human fibroblasts, resulted in cells that essentially share all the features of embryonic stem cells - but without using or destroying embryos.