The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force successfully flight
tested its first Raytheon-built Standard Missile-3. The
SM-3 Block IA missile engaged and destroyed a medium-range ballistic missile target more than 60 miles above the Pacific Ocean.

Personnel at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai launched the ballistic missile target while the crew of the Japanese destroyer JS KONGO (DDG-173) fired the intercepting missile.

The melodious sound of a songbird may appear effortless, but his elocutions are actually the result of rigorous training undergone in youth and maintained throughout adulthood. His tune has virtually “crystallized” by maturity. The same control is seen in the motor performance of top athletes and musicians. Yet, subtle variations in highly practiced skills persist in both songbirds and humans. Now, scientists think they know why.

Their finding, reported in the current issue of “Nature,” suggests that natural variation is a built-in mechanism designed to allow the nervous system to explore various subtle options aimed at maintaining and optimizing motor skills in the face of such variables as aging and injury.

At its core, healthy neurological function hinges on the efficient passage of information between brain cells via the synapse.

Figuring out how the synapse traffics this information -- a process called neurotransmission -- is crucial to understanding the function of the healthy and diseased brain.

Now, a team led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City has spotted a crucial new piece to that puzzle.

Their findings, published today in Neuron, focus on the role of a cellular enzyme called Synaptojanin 1 (Synj1).

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed the world’s ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other comparable period in human history.

What researchers in a new Ambio paper are calling 'The Great Acceleration', stage 2 of the Anthropocene epoch, leads to questions how humankind will react in stage 3 - defined as the recognition that human activities are indeed affecting the structure and functioning of the Earth System as a whole.

Increased research and understanding, the Internet, and more free and open societies have influenced humanity to become a self-conscious, active agent in the operation of its own life support system.

Broadband access has transformed the economic potential of the internet but the ADSL technology that delivers broadband to homes over traditional copper telephone wires is reaching its limit of around 10 megabits per second. If we want speeds ten times faster we need to replace the copper with optical fibers.

Optical fibers carry signals with light rather than electricity. They have been used in telecommunications for many years, especially over ‘long-haul’ links such as transatlantic cables and other trunk routes. Professor Henri Benisty, of the Institute of Optics Graduate School near Paris, likens them to motorways, carrying a lot of traffic but with only a small number of entrances and exits.

A thin polymer bio-film that seals surgical wounds could make sutures a relic of medical history.

Measuring just 50 microns thick, the film is placed on a surgical wound and exposed to an infrared laser, which heats the film just enough to meld it and the tissue, thus perfectly sealing the wound.

Known as Surgilux, the device’s raw material is extracted from crab shells and has Food and Drug Administration approval in the US.

Every advance in memory storage devices presents a new marvel of just how much memory can be squeezed into very small spaces. Considering the potential of nanolasers being developed in Sakhrat Khizroev’s lab at the University of California, Riverside, things are about to get a lot smaller.

As reported in the latest issue of Technology Review, Khizroev is leading a team exploring lasers so tiny that they point to a future where a 10-terabit hard drive is only one-inch square.

A new study published in this week’s Christmas issue of the BMJ says that humor appears to develop from aggression caused by male hormones.

Does it mean men are funnier? Or that more aggressive people are funnier? It means men, especially aggressive men, think they are funnier, according to Professor Sam Shuster.

Planetary scientists have puzzled for years over an apparent contradiction on Mars. Abundant evidence points to an early warm, wet climate on the red planet, but there’s no sign of the widespread carbonate rocks, such as limestone, that should have formed in such a climate.

Now, a detailed analysis in the Dec. 21 issue of Science by MIT’s Maria T. Zuber and Itay Halevy and Daniel P. Schrag of Harvard University provides a possible answer to the mystery. In addition to being warmed by a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as on Earth, the early Mars may have had the greenhouse gas sulfur dioxide in its atmosphere. That would have interfered with the formation of carbonates, explaining their absence today.

Is the State of Texas about to offer Master of Science degrees in creationism? The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), an organization that officially believes the earth sprang into existence less than 10,000 years ago, has applied to offer a state-approved Master's program in science education. Last week, an official advisory committee recommended that the State of Texas approve the ICR's request to offer Master's degrees (read about it here and here). If this request is granted, the ICR has two years in which it can offer state-approved Master's degrees while seeking accreditation for its program from a recognized, outside accreditation organization. Coming on the heels of news that one of the state's science education officials was forced out of her job because she was not "neutral" about standing up for evolution education, this latest event suggests that creationism is about to again become a big issue in the Texas educational system.