A new mathematical model developed at the University of British Columbia integrates environmental and molecular sequence information to better explain how microbial networks drive nutrient and energy cycling in marine ecosystems.

The work could dramatically improve researchers’ and policy makers’ ability to predict how the world’s marine microbial communities (microbiome) respond to climate change, and resulting impacts on fisheries, biodiversity, climate and more.

The model and associated simulations were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team of physicians and laboratory scientists has taken a key step toward a cure for sickle cell disease, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to fix the mutated gene responsible for the disease in stem cells from the blood of affected patients. For the first time, they have corrected the mutation in a proportion of stem cells that is high enough to produce a substantial benefit in sickle cell patients.

The first animals evolved from their single-celled ancestors around 800 million years ago, but a new paper suggests that this leap was a lot less dramatic than scientists have assumed, because the single-celled ancestor of animals likely already had some of the mechanisms that animal cells use today to develop into different tissue types.

The researchers studied a single-celled amoeba called Capsaspora owczarzaki, which is a close relative of today's multi-celled animals. Capsaspora was originally discovered living inside a freshwater snail and the team sequenced the Capsaspora genome in an earlier project and discovered that the amoeba contained many genes that, in animals, are related to multicellular functions.

Last December, when the ATLAS and CMS experiments gave two bacl-to-back talks at the end-of-the-year LHC "physics jamboree" in the CERN main auditorium, the whole world of particle physics was confronted with a new question nobody had seen coming: could a 750 GeV particle be there, decaying a sizable fraction of the time into pairs of energetic photons? What new physics could account for it? And how to search for an experimental confirmation in other channels or phenomena?

Thanks to Padre for pointing out that there can only be a Dark Triad of sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism because a tetrad implies four.

How stupid was he?

He shut down the Center for Groundwater Research. I quote him: “You don’t need to grind water. It’s a liquid.”


He closed our renowned Digital Signal Processing program. He was then unable to process, when faculty flashed him a certain digital signal.


Next to go was the knockout mouse lab. He said, “They have some attractive mice, but none that I’d call a real knockout.”

Mars' largest moon, Phobos, has captured public imagination because the dominant feature on its surface (22-kilometers across) is Stickney crater (9-km across), a mega crater that spans nearly half the moon. 

The crater lends Phobos a physical resemblance to the planet-destroying Death Star in the film "Star Wars." But over the decades, understanding the formation of such a massive crater has proven elusive for researchers. For the first time, physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have demonstrated how an asteroid or comet impact could have created Stickney crater without destroying Phobos completely. The research, which also debunks a theory regarding the moon's mysterious grooved terrain, was published in Geophysical Review Letters.

President Obama, if you love science,
 Please protect Mars life from contamination from Earth
For Future of Exobiology - MOON FIRST

The nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (called Proxima b) in its habitable zone but the star seems nothing like our sun. It's a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the sun. However, new research shows that it is sunlike in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots.

Starspots (like sunspots) are dark blotches on a star's surface where the temperature is a little cooler than the surrounding area. They are driven by magnetic fields. A star is made of ionized gases called plasma. Magnetic fields can restrict the plasma's flow and create spots. Changes to a star's magnetic field can affect the number and distribution of starspots.

The US has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world, with soda consumption identified as one of the factors. On average, Americans consumed 46 gallons of soda in 2009, giving the US one of the highest rates of per capita soda consumption of any country. A recent report estimated that soda consumption caused one-fifth of weight gain in the US between 1977 and 2007.