An ancient protein dating back 80 million years to the Cretaceous period has been preserved in bone fragments and soft tissues of a hadrosaur - a duck-billed dinosaur - according to a study in the May 1 issue of Science.  The new findings support earlier results from analyses suggesting that collagen protein survived in the bones of a well preserved Tyrannosaurus rex, and offer new evidence supporting previous conclusions that birds and dinosaurs are directly related.

African, American, and European researchers working in collaboration over a 10-year period have released the largest-ever study of African genetic data—more than four million genotypes—providing a library of new information on the continent which is thought to be the source of the oldest settlements of modern humans.

The study demonstrates startling diversity on the continent, shared ancestry among geographically diverse groups and traces the origins of Africans and African Americans. It is published in the April 30 issue of the journal Science Express.

A team of scientists from Canada, Spain and the United States has identified a key gene that allows plants to defend themselves against environmental stresses like drought, freezing and heat. 

"Plants have stress hormones that they produce naturally and that signal adverse conditions and help them adapt," says team member Peter McCourt, a professor of cell and systems biology at the University of Toronto. "If we can control these hormones we should be able to protect crops from adverse environmental conditions which is very important in this day and age of global climate change."

Who among us hasn't been tempted to take the easy way out? Hopefully we choose to do the right thing, but this isn't always the case. It's bad enough when your actions just affect you. But when they affect the rest of the world? And mislead people working toward collective knowledge? That puts you on the ranks of the scales of depravity.

Part 1 dealt with the Rock of Love; part 2 examined anything with "real" in the title. Part 3 lists a few of the frauds, fakers and other cheaters in the realm of science.

At least once a year, Cosmo’s cover story is about how to have better, longer sex: a turgid treatise on positions and anatomy.  Our finest ladies’ mags are ignoring the obvious.

To improve the mating of our species, we must learn from the mistakes of garden spiders and band together to end sexual cannibalism once and for all.  

Female Argiope spiders only want what all of us want—the upper hand in the war of the sexes.  But your friendly neighborhood garden spider has more at stake than the proper replacement of the toilet seat. 

Have we really stopped evolving? In Cosmos magazine, Steve Jones argues that human evolution is coming to an end:

The question I have is: will human evolution really continue? I think the evidence shows that human evolution has largely come to a halt.

He lists three components necessary for human evolution:

First of all there's variation, which comes from mutation. Second, natural selection, which comes from inherited differences between individuals and their ability to reproduce.

When a fake pandemic is being generated by media corporations having a slow news week, fake medicine is sure to pop up and take advantage of it.   The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) today issued a warning to the public about the risks of buying online medicines for swine influenza, such as Tamiflu or Relenza.

David Pruce, RPSGB Director of Policy said, "With the current fears about swine flu, we are concerned that unscrupulous people are exploiting the public's fears about swine flu by offering to sell the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza over the internet.

"This is a golden opportunity for counterfeiters to offer fake supplies of these drugs.

When a jet is flying faster than the speed of sound, one small mistake can tear it apart.   It was so feared that the physics blended with the supernatural in the mid 1940s.  Luckily, Chuck Yeager didn't believe in demons.

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. His controls would freeze up, his plane would buffet wildly, and he would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man would ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.