The Kepler mission revealed the existence of potentially habitable planets slightly bigger than Earth. 

The spacecraft named for Johannes Kepler was launched in 2009 and now it has found two new planetary systems, Kepler-62 and Kepler-69, about 1,200 light years from Earth that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. 

The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets.

When we say "off the grid," we often mean off the power grid.

In quantum physics, objects can be in more than one place at a time and future events can change the past - don't get caught up too much in that or you won't sleep at night.

A new paper says quantum physics can be even spookier. Using the “chained” quantum Zeno effect, the researchers write that they have discovered a form of "almost psychic communication" in which information can be exchanged between two parties without photons, or any physical particles, traveling between them.

With 25,000 journals in existence today, thanks in large part to the open access movement which charges a fee to print a study, keeping up with current scientific literature is a daunting task. Hundreds to thousands of papers are published each day.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a text-mining algorithm to prioritize research papers to read and include in their Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), a public database that manually curates and codes data from the scientific literature describing how environmental chemicals interact with genes to affect human health.

In America, a person who cuts your hair for $8 has to be licensed and obey minimum safety standards, but dietary supplements, which accounted for more than half the Class 1 drugs recalled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 2004-12 (meaning they contained substances that could cause serious health problems or even death) are stuffed full of  unapproved medicinal ingredients, including steroids,  a new study from St. Michael's Hospital has found.

The majority of those recalled supplements were bodybuilding, weight loss or sexual enhancement products, said the study's lead author, Dr. Ziv Harel, and almost one-quarter of the substances are manufactured outside of the United States, he said in the paper.

While the United States is now back at early 1990s levels of CO2 emissions, thanks to a switch to natural gas in the energy sector and a moribund economy, that doesn't apply to Asia. The middle class in China alone has a population that exceeds the entire USA and they all want, and are getting, cars and air conditioners and a better life and the emissions to go along with it. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise but warming, the telltale sign of climate change, has not.

Since 2000, global warming has tapered off and virtually no one in the climate science community predicted that could happen.

Research has established that caffeine interferes with processes in cancer cells that control DNA repair, a finding that has generated interest in using the stimulant as a chemotherapy treatment, but given the toxic nature of caffeine at high doses, researchers from the University of Alberta have instead taken advantage of caffeine's lethal effects on cancer cells identify genes and pathways responsible for DNA repair.

The research team found that fruit flies with a mutant gene called melanoma antigen gene, or MAGE, appeared normal when fed a regular diet but died when fed food supplemented with caffeine. On closer inspection, they found the mutant flies' cells were super-sensitive to caffeine, with the drug triggering "cell suicide" - apoptosis. 

Researchers have taken a step forward in efforts to help people with memory loss tied to brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. Using sea snail nerve cells, the scientists reversed memory loss by determining when the cells were primed for learning. The scientists were able to help the cells compensate for memory loss by retraining them through the use of optimized training schedules. 

This latest study builds on a 2012 investigation that pioneered this memory enhancement strategy. The 2012 study showed a significant increase in long-term memory in healthy sea snails called Aplysia californica, an animal that has a simple nervous system, but with cells having properties similar to other more advanced species including humans.

X-ray astronomy is only 50 years old but nothing shows the progress of the technology like a new view of a supernova scientists watched over a thousand years ago. 

In 2013, stem cell therapy is touted as the future of medicine by proponents in Europe and Asia while scientists in America urge caution. Contrast that to a decade ago, when the concern was that American President George W. Bush was holding back progress because he limited federal funding for one form of stem cell research. In 2012, Governor Rick Perry of Texas not only believed in stem cell research, he declared that he wanted to make his state the home of American stem cell science.