Humans have about 23,000 genes and we are at the top of the food chain but the animal with the most genes is the near-microscopic freshwater crustacean Daphnia pulex, or water flea, clocking in around 31,000.

Daphnia is the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced.   The findings are part of a comprehensive report by members of the Daphnia Genomics Consortium, an international network of scientists led by the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics (CGB) at Indiana University Bloomington and the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.

Coffee can be quite good for you, as any number of studies have shown.   But you still have to take some personal responsibility for moderation because companies like Starbuck's are not going to do it for you.    They're not in the personal responsibility business, they are in the drink business, so when they roll out a new size - the "Trenta" - this spring, all 31 ounces of it, they want you to buy it in any form you want.

There are exceptions, of course - some athletes will never be ethical no matter how much coaching they receive and not all coaches are ethical, but overall coaching helps athletes become more than better athletes.   

New survey data from Concordia University says coaches exert moral influence over athletes and how athletes respond.

Biofuels were all the rage in the 1990s, with Vice-President Al Gore declaring them the Holy Grail of fossil fuel replacement.    Unfortunately, no quality science agreed with that assessment yet they have been passed into law anyway by anti-science politicians who saw a way to please part of the voter base.

New papers in arXiv show that the Kepler space telescope continues to fulfill its mission of searching for exoplanets, especially those in the 'habitable' zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface, around stars.

Despite the various claims surrounding the idea of alien visitation in the past, one of the primary arguments has been the creation of immense structures in the past that have been argued as being impossible to create without sophisticated modern technologies.  More to the point, the argument even suggests that it would take quite advanced technologies (even beyond our abilities today), to produce such construction projects.

Invariably the size of the blocks is mentioned (on the order of several tons to several hundred tons), as well as the issue of moving them, positioning them, and of course the precision involved in their placement.

A recent paper in the arxiv describes the observation, in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions produced by the LHC collider in the core of the LHCb detector, of a new decay mode of the particle called "B-sub-s", a meson which is a bound state of a anti-bottom-quark and an s quark.

Did you ever wonder why both, Einstein’s relativity theory and quantum physics, in theory as well as experiment, seem obsessed with the nature of light? The velocity of light, light clocks, entangled photons, and so on – why is it always light? This preoccupation is no coincidence. It comes directly from the fact that light does not actually exist. Think I am nuts yet?

FIS (Fish Information and Services, the "most comprehensive website for the commercial fishing industry") has a run of recent squid news.

Let's start with Illex argentinus, the Argentinian shortfin squid with a history of contention between fishers from Argentina and the Falkland Islands. After a 2009 crash, Illex rebounded somewhat in 2010 (possibly due to shifting environmental conditions), but so far the catch from the Falklands this year isn't looking good: