If a school system overburdened by costs cuts drama programs, celebrities get on television and lament the loss.  Athletics gets support from boosters if their programs are in danger but if a gifted program goes on the chopping block, the presumption is 'they are smart, they will do well anyway'.

It takes about 90 minutes to transmit a high-resolution image from Mars, but a new NASA optical communications system that NASA plans to demonstrate in 2016 will be so much faster it will even allow the streaming of high-definition video from distances beyond the Moon. 

This dramatically enhanced transmission speed will be demonstrated by the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), one of three projects selected by NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) for a trial run. To be developed by a team led by engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., LCRD is expected to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite developed by Space Systems/Loral, of Palo Alto, Calif.

Researchers have sequenced the genome of a man who was an Aboriginal Australian and used that to show that modern day Aboriginal Australians are the direct descendants of the first people who arrived on the continent some 50,000 years ago and that those ancestors left Africa earlier than their European and Asian counterparts. 

Anti-science progressive alarmists have been on a rampage against Bisphenol A (BPA), a common component of plastic used in many consumer products, because of concern it can mimic natural estrogen in the body. A new study by Brown University toxicologists, however, finds that male mice whose mothers were exposed even to high doses of BPA while pregnant developed no signs of harm to their testes as adults.

In the study, a team led by Mary Hixon, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown University and lead author Jessica LaRocca, a graduate student, exposed mice to BPA during days 10 through 16 of their pregnancy, the period of time when the sexual organs of their fetuses were developing.

 A poll on Mashable, unscientific but a talking point anyway, found nearly 75-percent saying they "hate" the Facebook news feed changes.

A hot new study in Nature has rearranged the molluscan family tree--with some surprising results!

No one can deny that cephalopods (squids, octos, and cuttles) are the brains of the family, with their cousins the gastropods (slugs and snails) coming in a close second. We'd all assumed that these two groups were closely related, with cephalopods evolving from a gastropod-like ancestor, refining a brain that already existed.

However! As summarized in the New Scientist:

The people with the atom smashers, especially the ones at OPERA (Oscillation Project with E-tR Apparatus) in Italy’s Gran Sasso, announced to likely have a whopping 60 nano second systematic error with some neutrino experiments, but it makes for much better news to question Einstein. The scientists blame journalists for the hype, but of course they prepared everything just so that the press has no reason not to go ahead and make an Einstein spectacle out of it – the BBC promptly obliged.

After a thorough two-year investigation, researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Oregon have identified over 70 genes that play a role in the repair of neurons after injury, specifically when it comes to the growth of axons. A massive genetic screening of 654 genes suspected to be involved, resulted in the identification of 70 genes that promote axon growth and 6 that inhibit it.