A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.

Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The analysis extends Pohl's previous work in this area and validates principles of microfossil data collection.

For the first time, scientists from the University of Washington School of Medicine, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Cambridge have determined how a plant hormone -- auxin -- interacts with its hormone receptor, called TIR1. Their report, on the cover of this week's issue of Nature, also may have important implications for the treatment of human disease, because TIR1 is similar to human enzymes that are known to be involved in cancer.

Flavonoids. You’ve heard of them -- the good-for-your-health compounds found in plants that we enjoy in red wine, dark chocolate, green tea and citrus fruits. Mother Nature is an ace at making them, producing different ones by the thousands, but no chemist has figured out a good way to synthesize a special class of these chemicals in the laboratory. Until now.

Karl Scheidt, assistant professor of chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, and his research team have synthesized 10 different flavanones, a type of flavonoid, using a new general method they developed that takes advantage of one simple catalyst.

There is broad consensus today that personality traits are best described by the "Big Five": Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Each of these broad measures can be broken down into smaller ones, but in general, this taxonomy appears to take in most of what we think of as personhood. When you think of someone as "steady" or "flaky" or "gloomy" or "daring," what you’re really doing is unconsciously taking a measure of these five traits and crunching them together.

Common practice in the treatment of adolescent eating disorder patients has been to exclude the parents. Many experts consider parents part of the problem and thus keep them away during therapy.

Two U.S.–based clinicians disagree and have written a "how to" book published in February that includes family in the treatment of these patients. They say parents are well poised to help their children overcome bulimia nervosa, a disorder characterized by binging and purging.

The Scientist printed an article on the blogging of scientific data, with a focus on Reed Cartwright's inclusion as a co-author on a paper because of ideas that he shared on his blog. This is an impressive example of how social software can serve as a primary information source in science (whether intentionally or not). The part I enjoyed the most (referring to Bora):

Zivkovic concedes that he has had less luck in convincing people that he should post his dissertation on his blog before he publishes it.

Texas wheat offers high quality when it comes to baking and milling characteristics, said Texas Agricultural Experiment Station's state wheat breeder.

Dr. Jackie Rudd, Experiment Station wheat breeder at Amarillo, received the annual Millers' Award from Tim Aschbrenner of Cereal Food Processors at the recent Wheat Quality Council annual meeting in Kansas City.

Most basic science is performed using animal models on the assumption that we can learn something about humans by studying how other animals work. Obviously, the ethical issues surrounding human experimentation necessitates the use of animals models. It wasn't always this way though, and the history of science is littered with examples of human experimentation.

I was thinking about how us humans have 25,000 or so genes, and I know nothing about 99.9% of them. And I call myself a molecular geneticist! Wouldn't it be nice to know a little more about the strands of DNA that play a big part in making up who we are? I think it would be, so I'm going to start a semi-frequent excersion into the human genome and invite any willing blog readers to join with me.

The first fax machine had no value. It couldn't send a fax to anyone. It was, from a value perspective, useless.

The second fax machine added value to the first because it now had something which could receive faxes. The third added value to the first two and received value from them in the network as well. As each fax machine came into existence, the value it added was nonlinear. The more fax machines that existed, the more value each of them had.

Many things in life are like that.